


breathe quietly in the shadow of all that came before

by eneiryu



Series: mistakes aren't always regrets [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: And the Things We Do For the People We Love, Disappearances, M/M, Reappearances, The Mistakes We Make So That We Can Go Home, pack bonds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:35:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 53,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22780354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eneiryu/pseuds/eneiryu
Summary: Mason and Corey disappear without a trace on a random winter Sunday.
Relationships: Corey Bryant/Mason Hewitt, Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Series: mistakes aren't always regrets [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1642510
Comments: 62
Kudos: 207





	breathe quietly in the shadow of all that came before

**Author's Note:**

> You know, it's a little funny that a 52,000 word fic can now seem comparatively _short_ to me.
> 
> Credit to [ExtraSteps](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraSteps/pseuds/ExtraSteps) and [snaeken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snaeken), who not only provided the original idea, but then graciously put up with me constantly going "!!!!!" as I thought of new plot elements. 
> 
> Additional credit to [longeggboi](https://longeggboi.tumblr.com/), who provided a much-needed medical consult.
> 
> Series title taken from [this](http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=234) absolutely wonderful A Softer World comic.
> 
> Love, as always, to everyone who comments, leaves kudos, or just swings by to read. Please also keep the prompts coming--clearly I can't stop myself.

“I’m sorry, Liam,” the Sheriff says, “but there’s nothing.”

He rubs tired fingers over his tired forehead once he’s done, his elbows braced wide on his desk, and probably he _is_ exhausted— _definitely_ , Theo corrects, his nostrils flaring wide from his place leaned up against the back wall by the Sheriff’s office door, _he’s definitely exhausted_ —but Theo doesn’t think that’s why he does it. With his fingers and palms in front of his face he can’t see Liam’s crestfallen expression, all the hope that Liam had helplessly built up as he waited, and waited, and waited for the Sheriff to find _something_ collapsing in on itself.

“How is that possible?” Scott protests, sat in the second chair in front of the Sheriff’s desk and reaching out to clasp a steadying hand around Liam’s shoulder. “There’s got to be _something_.”

The Sheriff grimaces, but it’s Derek who answers. “Corey must have used his powers to get them out,” he counters quietly. “Malia and Cora and I have scoured every inch of town since their disappearance, and the Sheriff’s right—there’s nothing. No footprints, no scent trails—”

“—no security camera footage, no credit card receipts,” the Sheriff adds, pointedly if gently, and Liam covers his face with his hands.

“So they did run,” Liam translates dully, his voice muffled by his palms. “It wasn’t—it wasn’t Monroe.”

“Hey, that’s a _good_ thing,” Scott reminds him, now leaned far enough over in his chair that the legs are in danger of slipping out from underneath him. But his uncertainty catches up with him the next second and he falters, some. “I mean, it’s not the _best_ thing,” he tries, lamely and clearly aware of it given the pained grimace that briefly twists his lips, “but it means they’re probably not in danger, right?”

 _You hope_ , Theo counters silently, but doesn’t say, and then he flicks his eyes up to the Sheriff as the Sheriff leans forward over his desk, the old-and-cracked leather of his office chair creaking as he does.

“Argent’s still looking,” he reminds Liam gently. “And I’ll keep looking, too. We _all_ will,” he says, glancing around the room at Scott and Derek and even, briefly, at Theo. “We’ll find them, Liam,” he promises, but he’s promising it to a room full of supernatural creatures with supernatural senses; Theo catches Derek’s eye as they both catch the skip to the Sheriff’s heartbeat.

“Okay,” Liam says, defeated, and Theo finally pushes himself off the back wall and gets a hand underneath Liam’s arm to lever him upright, ignoring Scott’s narrow-eyed look as he does it.

“C’mon,” Theo tells Liam softly, _too_ softly, “I’ll take you home,” and leads Liam out of the station, and out to his truck.

And then, an hour later, Liam safely deposited blank-eyed and despairing back in his living room, Theo stands in the middle of the apartment that Argent had set up for him in Derek’s building, the warding magics prickling over his skin, and breaks his own hand.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he snarls out between gritted teeth, but doesn’t let up, just continues twisting the separated bone of his thumb down, and sideways, holding it in place against the side of his leg so it can’t heal as he slides his other hand up to the bracelet around his wrist.

The magic of it _sears_ at him as he starts to work it down, and off, the spell trying desperately to keep its hooks sunk deep in him, and by the time it finally slips over the ridge of his broken thumb, Theo is on his knees, sweating and panting. After a few seconds Theo gives in to the pain and hollow-stomached exhaustion in his chest and lets himself topple over, pressing his forehead to the cool wood of the apartment’s bare floors as his hand slowly heals, the process made sluggish and slow by the magic’s draining of his body’s resources; Theo has to fight to keep his fluttering eyelids open.

Has to fight to keep hold of the bracelet, clenched tight in his shaking fingers.

The pressure at the back of his skull leads him north, towards Oregon. He works his hands on his steering wheel, his jaw clenching as he tries to calculate hours and miles—his mind drifting uneasily to the bracelet he’d left sitting on a plate in a small pool of his own blood—and then he has to hiss as the cut across his palm twinges; still not fully healed. _God damn it_ , he thinks, taking his hand off the wheel to glance at it, still stark even in the dim light of the waning moon and the headlights of the cars rushing past him on the highway.

It takes just under three hours for the vague press just above his spine to become a steady, insistent _awareness_ , and Theo understands almost immediately why Mason and Corey chose the backwater town that they did when he drives through the middle of what qualifies as downtown. No cameras, he notes, peering up and out of his windshield at the streetlights and lampposts he passes, and the sheriff’s station he drives by has only one cruiser in the lot. Theo taps his fingers thoughtfully against the steering wheel—his palm now finally, _finally_ fully healed—and then takes a sharp right into a run-down neighborhood.

He parks in front of a darkened house covered in peeling paint and fronted by crumbling concrete stairs, and gets out of his truck. Spinning in a circle with his eyes closed, the pressure at the back of his skull throbs when he faces east, and so Theo flips up the hood of his dark hoodie and jams his fists into the front pocket, and starts walking.

There’s a _For Sale_ sign outside the front of the house that he finally stops in front of, the colors of it sun-faded and the post holding it up chipped. _Huh_ , Theo thinks, and then he takes a deep breath, and stretches out his senses, searching the house room by room until he finds what he’s looking for.

And then he starts up the driveway.

The front door is locked, unsurprisingly. Theo palms the lockbox hanging from the handle and tilts it back and forth, but then lets it fall back down, and circles around to the back instead. He has to pick his way through tangled, overgrown weeds to do it, but even in the dim light of the moon he can see the beginnings of a well-worn path cutting through them towards the back door, and he follows it.

This time the door opens easily, and so Theo slips carefully inside and closes it silently behind himself. The house is pitch-black so Theo flares his eyes, blinking a few times to let them adjust before starting to pick his way forward, ears peeled for every creak and groan the house makes as it settles on its foundations, as it braces against the harsh winter wind outside.

He’s focused on the heartbeat pounding weakly from the top floor, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t catch the split-second displacement of the air just behind him as Corey drops his camouflage.

Ducking to avoid the clumsy strike Corey aims at the back of his head, Theo pivots quickly around him and gets one hand on Corey’s near arm, the other on his far shoulder. He slams Corey up against a nearby wall as he gets Corey’s arm twisted up behind his back, levering up just enough that Corey sucks in a sharp, pained breath and goes reluctantly still, though Theo can still feel him practically vibrating with tension.

“Hey, Corey,” he greets, saccharine and falsely sweet. “Long time.”

“Fuck you!” Corey shouts back. “You can’t, you can’t _be here_ , you’ll lead them—”

He cuts off when he sees the bare wrist Theo shoves in front of his face, Theo shifting his grip on Corey’s pinned arm to allow it. Corey’s eyes flick back to Theo’s—or at least the eye set in the half of his face that isn’t smashed against the wall does—and Theo sees his brow furrow in confusion.

“I—I don’t,” he stammers. “But Argent said—!”

“Argent spelled the bracelet with a ritual meant to bind a supernatural creature,” Theo explains impatiently. “But I’m not _a_ supernatural creature, am I?”

He pushes off of Corey once he’s said it, releasing his arm and shoulder as he takes a few steps back. Corey immediately spins, his recently-locked arm cradled against his chest, his mouth mulish and his eyes suspicious as he watches Theo warily.

“What are you doing here?” He demands.

“Funny,” Theo tells him. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

Corey’s mouth twists, the flat line of it becoming a snarl as his nostrils flare wide. Theo mentally waves away the reflexive surge of adrenaline that bolts up his spine at the scent of Corey’s aggression, and holds his ground.

“How’d you find us?” Corey demands instead of answering, and Theo rolls his shoulders to resettle his tensing muscles—the shift slouching restlessly under his skin—and smirks.

“You and I share an ancestor,” he replies, and both ignores Corey’s confused frown and gives up on his and Corey’s standoff to start for the stairs he can see at the end of the hallway.

“What the fuck does that—” Corey starts to spit, and then he seemingly realizes what Theo’s doing and where he’s going, and he makes a panicked noise and lunges for him.

But Theo’s patience is spent—he’s running out of _time_ —and so Theo just catches him again, and pins him back against the opposite hallway wall as he gets his arm twisted up against his back once more. He leans harder against Corey’s trapped arm and then slides the crook of his other arm up underneath Corey’s chin, yanking his head back into a headlock as he goes.

“The Doctors used the same donor werewolf DNA when they created me, and you, and the rest of the chimeras,” Theo tells him over the harsh sounds of Corey’s struggles as Corey thrashes against his hold. “That pressure at the back of your skull, that awareness that gets sharper or dimmer depending on where you are, and who you’re with? That’s me. That’s me, and _Mason_ , which is how I know he’s here. Now let’s _go_.”

He pulls Corey off the wall by his neck and pinioned arm, and starts walking him forcefully towards the stairs. Corey keeps struggling, but Theo has him firmly controlled, and is stronger than him besides, and it doesn’t take Theo long to drive him tripping up the stairs, and then down the upstairs’ hallway to the last bedroom on the right.

Once inside, Theo shoves Corey away from him, and then stays firmly planted in front of the door to block Corey’s exit. Corey’s and _Mason’s_ exit, though that latter turns out to be entirely unnecessary, because Mason—Theo’s eyes drawn instantly to him no matter Corey’s hacking coughing off to the side—is collapsed in the room’s bed, his skin ashen and the sheets that are tangled up around him sweat-stained and damp.

“Jesus _christ_ ,” Theo breathes, and then suspicion flares instantly in his chest and he reaches out and gets a hand back in Corey’s shirt. Pivoting, he slams him back against the wall next to the door and gets right up in his face. “What else is wrong with him?”

Corey won’t meet his eyes. “What are you, what are you _talking_ ab—”

“If he was just sick you wouldn’t have ran,” Theo snarls, cutting him off by pulling him off the wall and slamming him back into it. “ _What else is wrong?_ ”

He’s about to shake him again when behind him he hears, “Theo. Theo, _stop_.”

Theo turns at Mason’s rasping plea, and then he sucks in a sharp breath and takes a reflexive step back—his fingers still twisted in Corey’s shirt—as he gets a good look at Mason’s eyes. _Oh, fuck_ , he thinks, his question to Corey answered— _both_ his questions to Corey answered, _what else is wrong_ and _what are you doing here_ —as he stares.

Corey takes advantage of his distraction to rip free of his grip, twisting around to plant himself in front of Theo to block Theo’s view of Mason, his shoulders heaving.

“He’s not the Beast,” Corey stumbles over himself to say, his attempt to sound firm and threatening just completely undermined by the desperation in his voice. “I know what it looks like, but he’s _not_.”

Theo shoots him an incredulous, dismissive glare and then shoves past him. “Of course he’s not the Beast, you idiot,” Theo snaps, and twists his wrist free of Corey’s attempted grab before shoving him back harder with the same hand as he continues, barely slowed, towards Mason on the bed. “The Beast is dead.”

“Wait,” Corey stutters. “Wait, you _believe_ …?”

Clearly _Corey_ hadn’t, not entirely and no matter what unshakable faith he’d been trying to present, but Theo doesn’t hold it against him; he knows something about believing so hard and so desperately in something that it becomes the next best thing to the truth. What he _does_ hold against Corey is Mason’s half-dead state, his cheeks sunken and his eyes—once the ghostly, pale blue filled corner to corner of each of them fades, anyway—glassy. Ignoring Corey still frozen behind him and Mason too weak to stop him, Theo perches himself on one hip on the bed and yanks away the sheets covering Mason’s chest, then lifts Mason’s shirt up.

His ribs are stark, as suspected; Theo lets his shirt and then the sheets fall back down with a harsh, frustrated exhale.

“He was worried about Argent,” Mason hurries to tell him, all in a rasping rush. His eyes flick over Theo’s shoulder to Corey and his lips curl up in a weak, shaky smile. “He panicked.”

“So you _didn’t_ agree to this,” Theo interprets, and laughs humorlessly, and under his breath, when Mason’s expression briefly crumples with guilt. Shaking his head slightly, Theo tips his head back so he can look at Corey over his own shoulder. “What’d you do, knock him out and spirit him away in the middle of the night?”

“Fuck you,” Corey repeats fiercely, but his voice breaks in the middle of the attempted insult, and he can’t meet Theo’s eyes.

“Jesus,” Theo mutters, and scrapes his palms down his face, and then he turns back to Mason. “This started on the full moon, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” Corey hurries to agree, just as Mason says, “No.”

Theo glares briefly at the wall above Mason’s head. And then something occurs to him, and he looks back down.

“You’ve been getting sick a lot,” he realizes slowly, frowning down at Mason. “Last month Liam thought you had the _flu_.”

Mason nods, though he has to stop and cough even at that simple movement. “It started—” with the exorcising of the Beast, no doubt, “—a while ago, and it’s been getting—getting _worse_ , but it wasn’t until the full moon last week that—”

“ _Mason!_ ” Corey hisses.

“—I transformed,” Mason finishes, and grimaces apologetically at Corey.

“You looked like the Beast,” Theo guesses neutrally.

Mason flinches. “Not as big,” he explains, “but with the—” he waves a hand next to his previously-glowing, ghostly eyes, “—and the blue-tinted skin, and the teeth.”

He bares his teeth in a weak approximation of the Beast’s fang-filled mouth, and Theo nods once to indicate that he can stop, the effort of it clearly straining Mason’s limited energy.

“Corey was with me when it happened,” Mason confesses quietly. “I was going to go to Scott, but…”

He trails off, but he doesn’t need to continue. The rest of his sentence goes _but Corey panicked, and essentially kidnapped me, and brought me here_. Theo turns to look at Corey to find him glaring defiantly back.

“What would _you_ have done?” He hisses. “You know better than anyone that Argent’s the _beg forgiveness_ type—”

And boy, does Theo; his formerly-braceleted wrist throbs.

“—and he’d already wanted to kill Mason in the tunnels, back during— _during_ , and if, if he saw Mason like that, he would have thought—!”

That the Beast wasn’t dead, probably. That the McCall pack’s insane plan to use a combination of _the power of love_ and Lydia’s banshee scream hadn’t worked after all. That some part of the Beast, or Sebastian Valet, or both, lingered on in Mason.

It’s what Theo would have thought, if he didn’t know better.

“And so you thought, what, that bringing him to some abandoned house in the middle of nowhere to die slowly was a better plan?” Theo inquires pointedly; Corey flinches bodily.

“I’ve been trying to—” He tries.

“It’s not working,” Theo cuts him off, uninterested in what, particularly, Corey had _been trying to_. “You need to take him back to Beacon Hills.”

“No!” Corey shouts, and takes a step forward like he’s—like he’s trying to _threaten_ Theo, absurdly enough. “No. Not while he’s still...Not while there’s a chance that…”

“Corey, enough. Scott’s not going to let Argent hurt him,” Theo snaps, whatever meager patience he’d managed to recover between the hallway and the bedroom now gone, and slices a hand through the air when Corey opens up his mouth, no doubt to repeat his point about Argent’s preferred method of _begging forgiveness_ rather than _asking permission_ , “and I can’t _help him_ here.”

 _That_ draws Corey up short. “What?” He breathes, at the same time that Mason asks, “You—you can help me?”

“ _If_ I have access to the remains of the Doctors’ operating theaters, the ones that are _in Beacon Hills_ ,” Theo agrees, putting hard, deliberate emphasis on each of the caveats. He leaves off the last caveat—the _maybe_ , _maybe-not_ of his likely success—and holds Corey’s desperate, riveted attention. “I know what’s happening to him, Corey. You come back to Beacon Hills, and I’ll fix it.”

Corey just keeps staring at him, shocked, but the sudden silence gives Mason the opportunity to venture, his voice small and painfully thin between his exhaustion and the terror that he’s becoming less and less able to hide: “What—what _is_ happening to me?”

Theo takes a deep breath, impatience burning at him, but Mason—Mason is his best opportunity to resolve his and Corey’s current standoff cleanly, and so he focuses on Mason and softens his voice.

“You’re a chimera,” Theo tells him. “You have been since the Doctors…” Theo drops his eyes away from Mason’s as he says that last bit, his throat closing up some as _shame_ slithers unfamiliar down his spine. Exhaling out slow, he forces his eyes back up to Mason’s attentive ones and continues, “All of us were designed to be able to house the Beast, but you’re the only one who _did_. Now, without it there…”

“Oh,” Mason says, apparently getting it. “My body is, what…breaking—breaking down?”

“Destabilizing,” Theo corrects. “But yeah, essentially.”

“How do you—how do you _know that?_ ” Corey demands, apparently having relocated his voice.

“I spent a long time with the Doctors, Corey,” Theo reminds him, irritation turning the edge of his vowels sharp. Corey glares at him.

“But you can stop it. You can—can _stabilize_ him?” He asks after a long second, desperation just about tipping the question over into a demand.

 _I can try_ , Theo thinks, but out-loud he just repeats, “In _Beacon Hills_.”

He looks back at Mason as the bed shifts, Mason shakily trying to push himself upright. It’s painful to watch and Theo reaches out automatically, gentle hands on Mason’s arms to help pull him to a sitting position. Mason smiles weakly at him.

“Okay. Okay, then we should—” He starts to say.

But this time Corey cuts _him_ off. “ _No_ ,” he snaps, and shakes his head a little wildly when Mason and Theo both jerk to look at him. “No,” he pleads, holding Mason’s eyes. “Not while—”

“Corey,” Mason interrupts him gently. “Theo’s right. Scott won’t let Argent hurt me. And anyway, I don’t—I don’t think Argent wou—”

“Are you _sure?_ ” Corey demands harshly. “Are you one-hundred percent _sure?_ Because it’s your _life_ , Mason. If you’re wrong—if you’re _both_ wrong—it’s your _life_.”

He’s all but begging, now, crossing the distance between him and Mason and going down on his knees by the bed, his hands coming up to grasp Mason’s. Mason stares down at him, mouth dropped softly open in surprise, and then he looks up at Theo.

“Mason…” Theo warns quietly, his stomach sinking.

But Corey interrupts. “Help him here,” he orders, glaring at Theo. “Help him _here_ , and then—and then it won’t matter when we go back, because he won’t…he _won’t_ …”

“No,” Theo snaps, still sat on one hip on the bed and meeting Corey glare for glare. “No. You want my help, you _come back_.”

Mason glances back and forth between them, a distressed furrow between his brows, but Theo doesn’t have any attention to spare for him, because the line of Corey’s mouth is going mulish; because the expression on his face is going a fierce sort of determined. Theo feels intuition start to crawl up his spine, and he thinks _shit_ , immediately and without context, dread starting to curdle in his gut even though he can’t pinpoint exactly _why_.

“No,” Corey denies in turn. “No, you’re going to help him _here_. Because if you don’t, or if you—if you tell anyone where we are, _I’ll_ tell _Argent_ that you can slip loose of his attempted leash.” Corey smirks at him, vicious and mean. “How long do you think Scott and Argent will let you keep following Liam around like a lost little puppy if they find out you’ve been lying to them again?”

“Corey,” Mason reproves quietly, but Corey just continues to glare defiantly at Theo, who stares, stunned, helplessly back.

“Well?” Corey demands.

Theo jerks his attention away from him, his mouth curling in a snarl and the tips of his fingers prickling as his claws press insistently at his skin. His first, immediate instinct is brutal—to wrap one hand around Corey’s throat, and slam him back and _down_ until Corey thinks better of his threat, until he _submits_ —and he shoves it forcefully away. His second instinct is to _talk_ , to wrap his tarnished-silver tongue around Corey and Mason instead until he persuades them step by reluctant step to change their minds, to see things his way, and under any other circumstances he _would_ , but. Curling the fingers of his right hand over his bare left wrist, Theo bites back a harsh, frustrated sound, and forces himself to breathe. In, out.

“Give me your phone,” he orders finally, and holds out one hand.

Corey’s expression immediately goes cagey. “What?”

“Your _phone_ , Corey,” Theo snaps, gesturing impatiently with his hand. “Whatever burner phone you’ve been using since you turned tail and _ran_ in the middle of the night. I need to text you a list of supplies you need to go get me, so _give me your phone_.”

Corey just glances at Mason, who glances back at him. It’s Mason who finally ventures, “Supplies…?”

“You’re dying,” Theo tells him bluntly, a little pettily, viciously satisfied when both Corey and Mason bodily flinch. “And if you two won’t come back to Beacon Hills, then I need to halt your body’s deterioration _here_ , and _now_ , and I can’t do that out of thin air.”

He turns to glare at Corey.

“So _Corey_ is going to go take my truck, and use his newfound talent for breaking and entering, to go raid that clinic on the outskirts of town, the one off the main road.” It’s an insult and inquiry both, and Corey correctly interprets the two. His mouth thins even as he nods; he knows what clinic Theo is talking about. “And he’s going to fucking _hurry_ ,” Theo adds ruthlessly, “because if I can’t get back in time to get back inside my prison cell of an apartment before someone comes to take the wards down, there’s going to be a _third_ unexplained disappearance in Beacon Hills, and it’s going to be _mine_ when Argent decides to cut his losses.”

Corey leaves soon after with Theo’s truck keys in hand and a list of supplies to steal from the clinic, and Theo stands by Mason’s bed and watches him go. He closes his eyes once he hears the back door slam, and then he exhales out a quiet, rough breath and looks down at Mason.

“Your boyfriend’s a fucking idiot,” he tells him as he starts to roll his sleeves up with quick, economical movements, and Mason laughs weakly, legs crossed loosely under the bed’s sweat-stained sheets and his shoulders hunched tiredly in.

“Yeah, maybe,” he agrees easily, the insult sliding good-naturedly right off him, and he gives Theo a crooked, too-gentle smile as he quietly observes, “But I don’t think he’s the only one who knows something about doing something stupid for someone they love.”

Theo feels fear bolt electric and instantly down his spine, his breath freezing in his chest. But there’s no judgment in the exhausted corners of Mason’s eyes, in the curled-up twist of his lips—there’s the opposite, actually—and so Theo clenches his jaw, and looks away.

“Shirt off, and lay down,” he orders. “This isn’t going to be fun for either of us.”

\---

Art by [ArtZeppo](https://artzeppo.tumblr.com/)

\---

By the time Derek shows up at Theo’s apartment the next morning to lower the wards, Theo is back, and showered, and lying sprawled out on the couch that one of Derek’s former tenants had abandoned, his tablet propped up in his lap and his braceleted wrist—his hand still aching, even though it’d technically healed from Theo’s second breaking of it more than an hour ago—tucked behind his head. Theo closes his eyes as he feels the magics come down, the leather around his wrist briefly burning with the sensation, and when he opens them back up, Derek is framed in his open front doorway, one shoulder leaned up against the jamb and his arms crossed.

Derek squints at him. “Why do you smell like you took a bath in chemicals?”

“Good morning to you, too, warden,” Theo shoots back idly, eyes purposefully on his tablet. Derek rolls his eyes—Theo sees it out of the corner of his own—and lets it go; Theo feels something held preemptively tight in his chest unwind.

“C’mon,” Derek orders. “Argent thinks he has a lead on Monroe’s lieutenant Rossler.”

Argent does have a lead, and a good one. Theo’s actually, secretly, and _savagely_ pleased—Schrader hadn’t been the only one to have some fun at Theo’s expense, back when Monroe had him zip-tied to that fence, and before the two doomed omegas had been dragged down to join him—but the curl of vicious satisfaction in his gut isn’t the reason Argent’s news is so welcome.

“I need an escort into the tunnels,” Theo says to Argent later that day, Derek and the Sheriff and Parrish still huddled around the Sheriff’s desk looking down at the surveillance photos one of Argent’s contacts had taken.

Argent’s eyes narrow. “Do you, now?” He asks mildly.

Theo tries, and only partly succeeds, at not letting Argent’s skeptical tone bite at him. “I think there’s something in the operating theater that can help.”

Argent’s brows climb, just slightly. “Is there a reason that you didn’t mention this before?”

Theo smiles thinly back. “You didn’t have this lead before.”

Argent scoffs, but then he motions for Theo to wait and joins the Sheriff and the others still arranged around the desk. Theo listens with half an ear to the quick-fire strategy they discuss, the information noted and filed away but not focused upon, because Theo has more pressing concerns. He closes his eyes as he leans back against the Sheriff’s office wall and pictures the operating theater, planning and planning.

The wards that Argent had Deaton place around the operating theater are even stronger than the wards he’d had Deaton place around Theo’s apartment; strong enough that Theo’s wrist and then his whole arm start to burn the closer they get. Argent notes his discomfort, Theo knows he does, and while the satisfaction in Argent’s assessing stare isn’t petty, it is _there_ ; visible proof, or so Argent must think, that the wards work.

Theo grits his teeth, and doesn’t correct him.

“What are we looking for?” Argent asks after he’s lowered the wards and gestured Theo pointedly before him into the room; the flash of his gun holstered underneath his arm is probably unintentional, but then again—it might not have been.

“The Doctors had a map, and a compass. Spelled,” Theo answers. “They used the goggles to track supernatural creatures by frequency—” the goggles that had been _mysteriously_ destroyed in the immediate, chaotic aftermath of the Wild Hunt, “—but when they needed to find humans…”

To find their _test subjects_ , Theo could have said, but purposefully hadn’t. Argent’s mouth thins regardless. But he also starts looking around, poking carefully at the piles of papers and dusty glass and metal equipment, his sharp eyes roving. Theo does the same, though he isn’t looking for the map or compass; he knows exactly where they are. But shoved into the corners of stainless steel tables and half buried underneath layers of other random detritus are the items that Theo actually came here for; he palms them as he passes them without slowing, and continues his circuitous route around the room.

The next part is going to be the trickiest, and Theo considers his options. And then Argent’s phone vibrates in his pocket; Argent pulls it out, frowns briefly at it, and answers. He keeps his eyes on Theo at first, but it’s one of his hunter contacts—it’s _the_ hunter contact, the one who’d originally had the lead on Rossler—and eventually he turns away, his brow furrowing as he interrogates the woman on the other end of the line.

Theo doesn’t waste the opportunity.

Argent finishes his call and turns back around, mouth already opening to no doubt demand that Theo hurry up. Theo makes sure to be waiting a few feet away, leaned back against one of the tables and with the map and compass held loosely in one hand. He holds them up.

“They won’t help you find Rossler, you’ll have to do that the old fashioned way,” Theo explains, and offers both items forward when Argent holds out a hand for them. “But if Rossler has something of Monroe’s when you do…”

Argent rubs a thumb over the burnished bronze surface of the compass, and slides a finger in-between the folds of the map to press one side down, so he can look at the markings behind it.

“Hmph,” Argent says, and smirks, just slightly. But there’s no hiding his scent, which goes liquid and a little pleased.

Theo meets his eyes when Argent looks up at him, and holds himself still under the evaluating look. Finally Argent tips his head back towards the operating theater entrance.

“Let’s go,” he orders.

He also turns Theo loose afterwards, the next part of the hunt in his and the Sheriff’s and Derek’s hands. Theo gets in his truck and heads for the school, stopping only once along the way, and with his fingers tapping impatiently at his steering wheel all the while.

Liam’s where Theo expected him to be, sat alone at one of the weather-beaten tables in the high school’s courtyards with a textbook open between his braced elbows. He’s not seeing anything he’s looking at, though, even Theo can tell; he doesn’t turn a page or make a note for the minute it takes Theo to walk over to him, a bag of greasy takeout in hand.

He also startles when Theo drops the bag on top of his book, clearly having not heard Theo approach. “Shit,” he yelps, and flails backwards, and Theo reaches out reflexively to catch his shirt and haul him back upright onto the bench seat as Liam’s momentum starts to carry him over.

Rolling his eyes, Theo releases him and drops down into the seat opposite him. Liam’s cheeks are flushed with color and he won’t look Theo in the eyes at first, instead focusing too intently on smoothing his shirt back into place. But:

“Anything?” He asks quietly, eyes still downcast and fingers still playing at his hem.

“About Monroe, maybe,” Theo answers, a little reluctantly, and reaches forward to slide the bag towards himself and open it, his eyes on his hands as he pulls out one foil-wrapped burger and then another. “Not about Mason or Corey.”

If Liam had been in a better headspace, he might have been able to detect the slight jump to Theo’s pulse, but. Instead he just sighs, and closes his eyes, and scrubs his hands roughly back through his hair before he drops them, and visibly shakes himself. The smile he pastes on his face afterwards is patently false.

“Thanks,” he tells Theo, his voice a brittle sort of bright, and reaches for the nearest of the burgers.

Liam doesn’t talk, after that, and Theo doesn’t try and coax him into it. Instead he watches as subtly as he can—though that carefulness winds up being something of a wasted effort, Liam too distracted to notice even if Theo _had_ simply given up and stared openly at him—and resists every urge he has to complain, or fret, when Liam barely eats half of his burger, and no more than a handful of greasy fries. Still, at one point in his restless shifting Liam’s leg knocks against his under the table, and stays there when Theo doesn’t jerk back, or away; Theo focuses on that single point of warmth against his calf so he doesn’t have to think about Liam’s sour, cloying scent, or how exhausted he is, or the dark slash of leather across his wrist that he can’t help but see out of the corner of his eye.

Or the warm, metallic weight tucked carefully into his jacket pocket.

Theo’s listening for the bell from inside the school, an idle sort of concerned that Liam might miss it in his current state, and so it takes him a blinking second to fully register Liam’s question when Liam suddenly asks, “Do you think they’re alright? Mason and Corey,” he clarifies, apparently interpreting Theo’s blank stare as confusion as to which ‘they’ Liam had meant.

Theo has to resist the urge to tense up, Mason’s sunken, glassy-eyed face flashing before his eyes, made all the worse by the way the stinging sharp scent of Corey’s raw desperation had clogged up his nostrils, and manages it. “Yeah, Liam,” he says quietly, forcing himself to think instead of Mason’s eased breathing as he’d been leaving the abandoned house last night, Corey’s eyes wet with helpless relief. “Yeah, I think they’re okay.”

Liam searches his face, clearly _desperate_ to believe him and clearly just as unable to, and then he bites off a harsh noise and drops his head into his hands. “I just don’t _understand_ ,” he half-wails into his palms. “Why? _Why_ would they possibly run? What could _make them_ run?”

 _Fear_ , Theo thinks. Fear in every breath and twitch and thought of Corey’s; in the remembered bite of Scott’s claws in the back of his neck, maybe. In the slick steel barrel of Argent’s shotgun, and Argent’s quiet, calm, and seductive assurances about _the way things had to be_. And Mason far from immune, too, even if his fear was _for_ Corey, instead of directed at Argent; even if it was for Corey, instead of himself.

“I’m sure they had their reasons,” Theo murmurs, too serious, too _thoughtful_ , and when he blinks himself out of his momentary fugue Liam is staring at him. Theo shakes himself, and reaches out a hand to flick Liam lightly in the back of the wrist as he says, a physical _and_ mental distraction to pull his curiosity away from Theo himself, “Hey. We’re going to find them, okay? We’re going to bring them home.”

He smiles, a little helplessly, when Liam’s eyes dart up to his. But it’s worth it for the way that Liam’s lips flicker helplessly in return, and for the way that his scent starts to clear, just a little; just a bit.

The five-minute warning bell sounds from inside, and Liam’s head jerks up, and towards the school. Then his eyes flicker quickly back to Theo’s, a curious sort of narrow, before he abruptly stands and starts shoving his books back into his backpack.

“Thanks for lunch,” he repeats, more firmly this time, and reaches down to grab a handful of fries—more than the entire amount he’d eaten in the preceding twenty minutes—and shoves them in his mouth all at once.

Theo watches him jog off. “Sure,” he tells the empty air of the courtyard, and then he cleans up their trash, and goes back to his apartment.

“First things first,” he tells Corey later that night, after Corey has met him practically vibrating with barely restrained impatience at the back door of the abandoned house. “You two have to move.”

Corey’s mouth goes mulish with a frustrated, pissed-off frown. “I already _told you—_ ”

“I’m not saying go back to Beacon Hills,” Theo snaps, pushing past him on the way down the hallway, and towards the stairs up to the bedroom that Mason had been staying—had previously been _dying_ —in. “But I can’t waste six hours every night driving back and forth. You have to come closer. Do whatever you have to do, find another abandoned house,” Theo says, shooting Corey a mean-mouthed smirk, which Corey answers with a sneer, “but do it _closer_.”

“Fine,” Corey snaps, following close enough to Theo’s heels that he’s practically tripping himself, and Theo, up. “What’s the second thing?”

“This,” Theo replies, and turns around in the middle of the upstairs hallway to slap the antique, complicated-looking syringe in his hand against Corey’s chest, and hold it there. Corey goes a little cross-eyed as he looks down at it, and then his eyes go wide.

“Is that…?” He breathes.

“Yes,” Theo agrees shortly, and yanks it back when Corey goes to reach for it. Corey looks briefly baffled, and then almost instantly irritated. “It’s not a cure, Corey,” Theo tells him forcefully, and right over the skeptical look that immediately takes over Corey’s face. “It’s _not_. Not given what’s wrong with him.” Theo nods towards the other end of the hallway.

“It brought me back to _life_ ,” Corey mutters petulantly, his eyes drawn helplessly back to the shimmering, sickly green liquid inside the syringe; Theo palms it further to block his view.

“Yeah, and if you want to take the risk of killing him and then trying it _then_ , we can do that,” Theo replies nastily, and doesn’t move when Corey gives a silent snarl and half-steps towards him. “Barring that,” he continues, “you need to give it to him in small doses. 30 milliliters at a time, once a day.”

Corey works his jaw for a few seconds, and then he asks, “How do I know how much 30 milliliters is?”

Mason is sitting up when Theo eventually steps into the room, Corey once more on his heels. He smiles when he sees Theo, his eyes bright instead of glassy and his skin flushed with color rather than ashen, and Theo feels his own breath come a little easier as he sees it.

“Hey, Theo,” Mason greets cheerfully, and gives a little wave. Corey immediately eels out from behind Theo in the doorway and trots over to him, leaning down to kiss him quick before he twists to sit down next to him, his hip up through his shoulder pressed tight to Mason’s as they both look expectantly at Theo.

“Hey, Mason,” Theo returns softly, a reluctant sort of dread curdling in his gut as he swings the backpack on his back down, and around.

He has to take a shower in one of the abandoned house’s bathrooms once he’s done, but the hot water does nothing to wash away the tight, claustrophobic fit to his skin as he tries, and fails, not to remember Corey’s helpless, distressed expression as he’d helped hold Mason down. Theo pulls his clothes back on when he’s done—he’s going to have to dispose of them, or more preferably _burn_ them—before Derek or Scott or Malia or someone else can get a whiff of them, but they’re all he has, for the moment; he’s not exactly drowning in spare thermals and jeans.

Corey is watching Mason sleep when Theo steps back into the room. He flicks his eyes up to Theo’s when he hears, or sees, Theo coming, but almost immediately he swallows and drags his attention back down, and away. Theo smothers a flinch.

“I guess it makes sense,” he says, apropos of almost nothing, except that Theo knows exactly what he’s talking about. “I mean, Scott and Argent and the others needed like _triple_ the normal amounts of wolfsbane and stuff to even _affect_ the Beast.”

“Think of it this way,” Theo tells him, quiet and low and soothing, “it sucks _now_ , but after his abilities stabilize—” _if_ his abilities stabilize, “—he’ll be stronger than pretty much everyone but Scott.”

Corey manages a flicker of a smile, though he does it while pulling the sleeves of his long shirt down over his hands; a nervous, self-comforting gesture. Then he scrubs them—still fabric-covered—over his head, before dropping them and letting the fingers of his right hand poke out as he hovers the tips of them over the syringe by his hip.

“30 milliliters,” he double-checks, and nods in echo when Theo does. He taps the syringe once, punctuation, and looks up at Theo more steadily this time. Still, he hesitates for a few seconds before venturing, “Look. For the—for our _relocating_. Is there—is there a good spot, do you think?”

Theo thinks about it for a beat, and then he folds himself down next to Corey as he pulls out his phone, his fingers already tapping at the screen to pull up his map app. “Taylorsville, maybe,” he says, and tips his phone to show Corey, “or Chester could work.”

Corey doesn’t look, at first; his eyes had drifted back to Mason. But then he shakes himself a little, and he says, “Okay.”

He says, “Show me.”

\---

No one comes to take down the wards the next day.

Argent sends Theo a terse text to explain, but Theo doesn’t get it until early afternoon, when a pounding on his front door wakes him up. Liam is on the other side of it when Theo finally manages to untangle himself from the McCall’s borrowed sheets and roll off of the McCall’s borrowed air mattress, and stumbles downstairs to roll it open. Liam frowns when he sees Theo’s riot of bedhead and sleep-swollen eyes, but he’d _already_ been frowning, and his attention drags almost instantly back upwards, to the shimmering, iridescent wave of color that undulates gently across the activated surface of the wards encasing Theo’s apartment.

Theo realizes, then, in an absent sort of way, that Liam hadn’t been pounding on his front door at all, but on the wall next to it; he wouldn’t have been able to reach the door, not with the wards still up. That’s when he frowns in turn and checks his phone, which he’d absently grabbed on his way down.

“I thought the deal was these came down in the mornings,” Liam comments as Theo’s doing so, his tone an unsuccessful attempt at offhand, at mild.

Theo scans Argent’s text. “Argent, Scott, and Derek—” the three with the capabilities to control the wards, “—had to take off early with the Sheriff and Parrish to try and capture Rossler.” He shrugs. “They didn’t have time.”

“Hmph,” is all Liam says; Theo can smell his dissatisfaction.

Crossing his arms and leaning against the opened door—and sending the wards shimmering again—Theo blinks a few groggy times and then squints at Liam. “Not that I don’t appreciate the house call,” he prompts.

Liam blinks a few times in turn and then seems to shake himself. He also lifts the paper bag in his hand, and waggles it. “A thank you for yesterday,” he explains. And then he smiles ruefully. “Or an attempt at one, anyway.”

He taps the bag against the invisible barrier of the wards, color rippling out from the impact like a stone dropped in water. The bag slides through the barrier without issue; Liam’s fingers curled around it stop the instant they brush the shimmering wall of color. Theo quirks him a tired grin.

“Well,” he says. “It’s the thought that counts, I guess.”

But Liam doesn’t leave. Instead he asks Theo what he knows about the hunt for Rossler, and then why Theo was still asleep at one o’clock in the afternoon, and then finally sits down cross-legged in the middle of his side of the impassable breadth of Theo’s doorway. He starts unpacking the food he’d brought, and carefully positions each container of butter chicken and tikka masala and foil-wrapped packages of naan halfway on either side of the barrier. After a bemused second, these quiet little tendrils of warmth unfurling in his chest as he watches Liam work, Theo sits down opposite him, and picks up one of the plastic forks Liam pushes forward through the barrier with the back of his knuckles.

“So why haven’t you been sleeping?” Liam asks later as he’s finishing dragging the last of his torn-apart naan through the raita he’d dumped onto the paper bag the food had come in.

Theo winces; he’d still been more than half-asleep when he’d answered Liam’s earlier question, and his answer had been too unthinkingly honest. Luckily Liam is looking down at the food in his lap, his tongue between his teeth as he concentrates on maximizing the amount of raita he can get on a single chunk of naan. Theo watches him for a second, smirking slightly, and then he looks down at his hands in his lap and starts to run one nail carefully underneath the edges of his others; he’d more than scrubbed the last of Mason’s blood away, but.

“Nightmares,” he says eventually, which is _a_ truth even if not _the_ truth; at least not as of two nights ago. Liam blinks, first at the dripping piece of naan in his hands and then at Theo, apparently taken aback. “What?” Theo demands, though it’s curious more so than defensive.

Liam looks away. “Nothing,” he replies. “I just expected a deflection, or—” _a lie_ “—whatever, I guess.”

He stuffs the piece of naan in his mouth but even so there’s a small smile playing around his mouth that he’s doing a minimal amount to hide; Theo balls up one of the paper napkins and throws it at him. It sails immediately and harmlessly through the wards but sends them shimmering with color regardless, momentarily blurring Liam behind a dozen opalescent colors as they shiver and react. Theo regrets the action almost immediately; it draws Liam’s attention back to the wards, and his frown this time is less thoughtful and more dug-in; set firmly in the corners of his lips.

“This really doesn’t bother you?” He asks, and looks straight at Theo when he does.

Theo meets his eyes for a second, and then drags his own away to instead drag them along the surface of the wards as he taps the backs of the knuckles of one of his hands against them in a quick, cyclic wave, the wards bursting with color in response. _You’ve got two options_ , Argent had told him after he’d shot Theo once in the calf with a poisoned wolfsbane bullet, no one but them in the deserted warehouse parking lot where Theo had stashed his truck. He’d knelt by Theo’s side, and pressed the still-hot muzzle of his gun over Theo’s—his _sister’s_ —heart, and had said, _You cooperate, and I’ll give you time to prove that this new leaf you claim to have turned over is real. Otherwise I put you in the ground right now to join those two teenagers you murdered._

The Sheriff had been at the animal clinic with Deaton when Theo had followed Argent inside. Argent hadn’t healed his wolfsbane poisoning until the bracelet had been sealed around his wrist.

“No,” Theo answers honestly, and then: “Could be worse.”

Liam studies him for a few long seconds, and Theo lets him. Finally Liam quirks a smile and taps the back of one of his own knuckles against the wards, just once, and then he leaves it there, the skin around it going white as he presses it harder, and then harder, against the shimmering barrier.

“It bothers me,” he murmurs, so quietly that Theo has to deliberately sharpen his hearing to catch it. He stares at Liam through the undulating, hazy waves of color.

And then they both jump as the elevator at the end of the hall dings open.

Scott and Derek step out. Neither of them look surprised to see Liam, exactly, but they both look varying degrees of mule-mouthed about it. Theo doesn’t blame them; Liam’s scent tanks as he tips his head back to watch them as they approach.

“Little late, aren’t you?” He observes laconically, and Scott winces. Derek doesn’t so much as glance at him, just makes a complicated series of hand gestures and then closes one fist as he drags it down through the air from his shoulder to his side; Theo’s eyes close as he feels the wards fall around him.

“We couldn’t risk losing Rossler,” Scott tries to tell Liam, at the same time that Derek looks at Theo and says, “Let’s go. Argent wants you at Rossler’s interrogation.”

Theo climbs to his feet; Liam does not. “You know,” he tells Scott, “this wouldn’t even have been a problem if you’d made Argent add me to the wards like I suggested.”

Derek snorts, and not particularly quietly. Liam glares at him even as Scott says, “You know Argent and the Sheriff won’t agree,” gently.

“Liam,” Theo interrupts, before the mulish twist to Liam’s mouth can deepen further; Liam flicks his eyes to Theo’s, gold flecks dancing in the blue of his irises, and then he clenches his jaw and looks away.

They take Derek’s Toyota over to the warehouse Argent had selected as a sort of base of operations, and Scott decides to join Theo in the backseat instead of sitting next to Derek in the front. Theo doesn’t know why, until Scott twists to look at him and says, “I really am sorry about the wards.”

Derek’s eyes flick back to Theo and Scott in the rearview mirror, and Theo catches them unintentionally; reflexively. “It’s fine,” Theo tells Scott, though he’s still looking at Derek. And then he blinks, and—because Scott’s scent is still sour in his nose with guilt—adds, “Seriously. I didn’t even notice until Liam showed up.”

Scott frowns. “Why not?” Then, squinting at Theo’s still-messy hair—Theo hadn’t had time to shower, though Derek had grudgingly allowed him to change—he asks slowly, “Were you still asleep? Have you…not been sleeping well, or something?”

Theo mentally kicks himself—not _again_ —but luckily both he and Scott are rocked briefly forward and then back as Derek pulls to a stop in front of the warehouse, and shuts off the engine. Instead of answering Scott’s questions Theo steps out, and follows Derek into the building. Scott jogs to catch up with them, and while he opens his mouth and manages to insist, “Theo—” before they reach the main room and the small group of figures bunched in its center, he doesn’t manage more than that.

Argent looks back over his shoulder at them as they approach, and he raises a single eyebrow when he catches Theo’s eyes. Theo just looks back, and after a second Argent smirks, and turns back around. Back to Rossler, who’s bloody and bruised but clearly not from a beating; the wrenched, dislocated angle of his shoulder and the bleeding gash across his forehead spoke of his fervor in resisting his capture, not deliberately-inflicted pain.

And besides, neither Argent—nor the Sheriff, nor Parrish beside him—need that crude of methods; Theo, Scott, and Derek all step up to Rossler, and then fan out around him.

“Oh, isn’t this rich,” Rossler observes sardonically, his swollen, sharp eyes on Theo. “Found a new master, did you?”

“I’ll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours,” Theo offers easily, kneeling down before Rossler strapped into a simple metal chair.

Rossler sneers. “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he says, sharp-mouthed and viciously pleased with the upper hand that he’s convinced he has. “I don’t know where she is.”

Theo just smiles, and reaches forward to tap a knuckle lightly against Rossler’s chest. “That’s not what this says,” he disagrees, and grins wider when Rossler’s heart picks up even more speed. Theo turns his head just slightly back as he asks, “What do you think, Scott, Derek? Lie?”

Rossler pales.

His interrogation lasts hours. Argent and the Sheriff and Parrish take turns questioning him, the pace relentless and each of them asking variations on the same questions, outright to subtle to insinuating and back again, testing and testing and testing. No matter how much Rossler tries to keep up, he can’t, and even if he could; the Sheriff looks back at Derek, and then at Theo, and Scott, as each of them shakes their head in response to Rossler’s latest claim.

They take a break, an hour or so in; long enough for Theo to find an out-of-the-way corner and text Corey. _Unexpected development in BH_ , he sends. _Not tonight_. He puts his phone away, after that, not wanting to draw attention to it or himself, but he waits for the tell-tale vibration against his thigh. He waits a long time, and it isn’t until the next break that Argent calls that Theo gets a chance to check his phone. _O.K._ is all Corey’s reply says, and Theo wonders, instantly and helplessly, what he’d _actually_ wanted to say.

It’s still dark but threatening dawn outside of the warehouse’s filthy windows by the time Argent calls a final halt, Rossler sitting dazed in the middle of the room, his expression one blank, shellshocked stare. On a table next to him is a small foldable multi-tool, and Argent makes sure to scoop it up as he and Derek and Scott and Theo head for the exit, Rossler left with the Sheriff and Parrish to deal with.

“You sure this’ll work?” Argent asks Theo, and tosses him the tool.

Theo catches it, and turns it over in his hands. “Rossler wasn’t lying when he said this was Richmond’s,” he replies, though he flicks his eyes from Derek, to Scott, who both nod, before he continues, “As long as Richmond had it long enough, the map and compass should be able to find him.”

He tosses it back to Argent.

Derek takes Scott home, and Argent takes Theo. The lack of logic in the arrangement immediately puts Theo on his guard—Derek lives three floors above Theo, and Argent spends the majority of his nights at the McCall house, even if no one has fully acknowledged that fact—but the reason for it becomes clear quickly enough. Theo steps inside his apartment door and turns around, expecting to already see Argent performing the series of hand gestures to engage the wards, capped by his raising of an closed-to-open fist, but Argent is just leaning against the wall by the jamb, his hands in his pockets.

“Regardless of whether or not the map and compass work,” he says when he sees he has Theo’s attention, “we’re not going to be able to go after Richmond until tomorrow at the earliest.” He pushes himself upright. “Get some sleep,” he orders, and then he holds Theo’s eyes as he slowly starts to walk himself backwards, towards the elevator, his hands still in his pockets.

He’s smirking as the elevator doors close in front of him, sharp-mouthed and challenging. Theo spends a half-minute staring open-mouthed after him, and then he lifts an arm carefully up, and up, until his stretched-out fingers are hovering halfway in and halfway out of his open front door.

He holds them there for a few seconds, and then he snaps his jaw shut, and rolls the door closed, and heads upstairs.

He sleeps, for a few hours, and then he gets up and showers, finally. The temptation of the wardless front door pricks at him, and for a moment Theo considers, very seriously, risking exposure to take advantage of the extra time to go to Mason and Corey early, to try and steal a few precious hours from the vague, ever-shifting schedule he’d thought would be required to fully stabilize Mason’s condition, but then he doesn’t.

Instead, he spends the day in the bathroom of his apartment, his sleeves rolled up and his knees aching from kneeling on the hard tile, as he experiments and experiments with different concoctions of wolfsbane, and mistletoe, and mountain ash, looking for a combination that could overcome the Beast’s natural resistances to keep Mason out for more than a few seconds at a time. The first half-dozen mixtures he tries dissipate almost instantly when added to small droplets of Mason’s blood, the vial of it retrieved from underneath a loose floorboard in his living room—the glass of it sealed in an airtight container—but the seventh lasts half a minute before succumbing to the Beast’s—to Mason’s, now—advanced healing capabilities.

Theo—sweaty and sore and with his eyes and skin stinging from the smell and feel of the ingredients—grins.

\---

Theo’s expecting Corey to be pissed at him when he shows up that night at the new address— _it’s some rich person’s vacation home_ , Corey had explained dismissively, _they only use it during the summer_ —that Corey gives him.

And Corey _is_ practically vibrating again, but it’s not with tension; it’s with _excitement_. Enough of it that he not only yanks open the side door to the house with a broad, crinkle-eyed grin when Theo gets close, but reaches through the doorway to grab Theo’s wrist and pull him stumbling with surprise inside.

“C’mon,” he says breathlessly, and starts leading the way deeper into the house; Theo stops only long enough to shut the door—which Corey had apparently already forgotten about—behind himself, and then he follows the quick-stepping tread of Corey’s footsteps.

The reason for Corey’s excitement becomes crystal-clear soon enough. Theo stops at the entrance to the house’s kitchen and stares.

“Hey, Theo,” Mason greets, a little shyly.

He’s on his feet, and holding a bowl of something rich-smelling and warm in his hands; Theo watches his fingers, _waiting_ for a telltale sign of trembling, but they’re steady. Mason catches him looking and ducks his head a little as he smiles; as he shifts his weight from foot to easy, effortless foot.

Corey looks back and forth between the two of them, the grin he’d already been wearing getting wider and more blinding, and then he bursts out; seemingly can’t _stop_ himself from bursting out, “It’s working. Whatever you’re doing, it’s working.”

There’s so much tangled up in his voice that Theo almost can’t separate out all the individual threads of thought and emotion, but he catches _relief_ and _gratitude_ among them. It makes something warm bloom in his chest at the same time that he nearly winces, the carefully-capped vial of anesthesia analog in the backpack over his shoulder suddenly feeling like it weighs a million pounds.

But he doesn’t get a chance to focus on it; Mason suddenly convulses, and just barely manages to shove the bowl in his hands back on the counter as his fingers spasm. He brings them up to his squeezed-shut eyes after, but even still, the color and light behind his eyelids are strong enough that Theo can see the delicate tracery of his veins, lit up from the inside-out like a medical scan.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Mason apologizes; Theo’s nose reflexively wrinkles as he catches the metallic bite of blood in the air, and he realizes with a jolt that Mason must have just sliced his tongue open on his fangs. “This has been happening more and more, the last two days.”

Theo hesitates, caught and not wanting to interrupt as Corey hurries over to Mason’s side, his hands on Mason’s upper-arms to steady him. But the smell of their distress is so _stark_ —but Theo wants, instantly and overwhelmingly, the softer scent of their helpless happiness back—that he swallows, and forces himself to speak.

“It’s a good sign, believe it or not,” he assures them quietly, and smiles slightly when both of them look up at him; he has to fight not to flinch at the ghostly glow of Mason’s eyes, but manages it. “It means your actual, physical body—” Mason’s blood and bones and muscles, “—is getting strong enough to handle the shift.” He smiles a little wider at the naked hope in both of their eyes and adds, “It means it’s not killing you anymore.”

 _Or won’t kill you as fast_ , Theo silently corrects, but doesn’t say; Corey’s expression cracks open and he jerks his gaze away from Theo to look at Mason, who looks back in the scant seconds before Corey makes a helpless, stifled noise and surges forward to kiss him. He pulls back, after a few seconds, though he leaves his forehead against Mason’s as he turns back to Theo.

“You have more to do,” he correctly interprets, his voice low and hesitant and a little scared, but fiercely determined for all that. “What’s—what’s next?”

Theo operates on Mason right there in the kitchen, where the tile of the floor—underneath the plastic sheeting that Theo, gritting his teeth and forcefully ignoring the horrified expressions on both Mason’s and Corey’s faces—will be easier to clean. Theo hates himself for having to think of it, but Mason’s blood is still black, and runny; no matter his newfound ability to stand.

“You’re _sure_ that Argent and Scott and the others can’t find us using the map and compass,” Corey asks, maybe fifteen minutes into Theo’s latest procedure, and for about the fifth time since Theo told him about how he’d gotten into the operating theater.

“I told you, the map and compass only work on humans. You and Mason are supernatural—they would have needed the goggles Malia used to track her mother, and those were destroyed,” Theo answers, with a forced amount of patience, and with his mind on the expanse of Mason’s bare back before him.

“Yeah, by _you_ ,” Corey mutters; Theo doesn’t deny it. Corey lasts maybe another ten seconds, and then he speaks up again. “If you knew there was something in the operating theater that could help Argent and Scott and the others find Monroe, why didn’t you give it to them originally?”

Theo turns over Corey’s tone in his head, sparing what attention he can to picking at Corey’s scent, but there’s a surprising lack of judgment in his voice; maybe this whole experience had taught him something about shades of gray. Theo hesitates, initially, but then he touches his tongue to his bottom lip and exhales out heavily through his nose.

“It’s not that simple,” Theo finally answers without looking up, his attention reserved for his one hand braced carefully against Mason’s skin, his other holding a scalpel hovering over the knob of bone marking the top of Mason’s spine.

“Okay,” Corey allows. “But that doesn’t really answer my question.”

Theo rolls his eyes, but doesn’t look away; he’d already started the long incision down Mason’s back. Thank god the anesthesia analog he’d figured out yesterday does in fact work; Theo doesn’t think he could handle another night of Mason’s muffled, desperately-brave cries.

He also doesn’t hold the question against Corey; the first, or the second. He has the feeling that Corey isn’t asking just to ask; for all that Corey is in the room with them, sat on a section of counter and kicking his legs, his fingers are white-knuckled around the edge of the granite, and he keeps biting off these muffled, distressed sounds. Shifting some to block his view isn’t going to lessen Corey’s awareness of what’s happening to Mason—what Theo is _doing_ to Mason—but Theo does it anyway.

“I didn’t give it to them originally because I knew I was going to have to get into the operating theater one day,” Theo finally answers, the incision down Mason’s back done, and the two sides of his split skin held carefully open by Theo’s blood-stained fingertips.

“Oh, is that…” Corey starts, curious at first and then a little less so as he—from Theo’s best guess, his attention firmly elsewhere—makes the mistake of looking straight at Theo and therefore at the grisly sight beyond him. Theo hears him swallow. “Is that why you hadn’t left yet, then? Because you needed into the operating theater, and hadn’t found a good enough excuse to get into it yet?”

Theo considers telling him yes. Half because he really _can’t_ spare the attention for it, his eyes and fingers carefully running down the exposed stretch of Mason’s spine, working and working and working, and half just to end the conversation, Corey accidentally-or-not skating close to a truth Theo’s not sure he wants him to find, raw like an open wound. But the pungent reek of Corey’s distress is almost worse than the sharp bite of Mason’s blood in the air, and Theo—he sighs, and silences the shrieking, desperate voice in his head warning him not to, and gives Corey an honest—a _too honest_ —reply.

“No,” he says—admits—quietly, and gives himself one thing, just one, and doesn’t elaborate.

But Corey apparently doesn’t need him to. “Oh,” he breathes. “Oh, right. Duh. Um,” he says. “Sorry.”

He doesn’t stop talking—Theo doesn’t think he _can_ —but he steers the conversation elsewhere. After some gentle prodding he starts telling Theo about Mason’s condition; when it started getting better; when it gets worse. After awhile Theo mostly just hums into the lulls between the rise and fall of Corey’s voice, the sound of it becoming a sort of background noise; a welcome cover-up to the slick sounds of Mason’s cut-and-healing, cut-and-healing body.

“Speaking of leaving,” Theo says, two hours later and as he’s rinsing his hands and forearms in the massive and clearly barely-used sink in the kitchen. Corey—sat cross-legged on the ground next to Mason’s still knocked-out head—looks up at him as Theo turns around, dish towel in his hands as he scrubs his skin dry. “What I don’t get is why _you_ left at all.”

Corey frowns, but he doesn’t snap at Theo like he would have—like he _did_ —two days ago. “I told you,” he answers, and the furrow between his brows is _confusion_ ; confused as to why and how Theo could possibly be this dense, maybe. “I was—”

“—worried about Argent, I _know_ ,” Theo agrees, reaching back to brace his palms on either side of the counter by his hips. “But that’s what I don’t get. Argent, Scott, the entire goddamn McCall pack—you could have torn them all _apart_ if they actually tried to hurt Mason.”

Corey stares. “What are you _talking_ about?”

Theo cocks his head, studying him. “You still don’t know.” He’s not sure why the realization surprises him, but it does.

Corey scowls, his scent starting to thread through with irritation. “Don’t know _what?_ ”

Theo works his jaw, considering. He glances at Mason still slumbering peacefully by Corey’s hip; at one of Corey’s hands resting carefully on Mason’s back, the fingertips pressed down just hard enough to cause the slightest flush of red around his nails.

“Your abilities aren’t just defensive,” Theo tells him finally, and flicks his eyes back up to meet Corey’s.

They’re bright, and intent on Theo’s, and there’s a sudden stillness to his limbs—to his fingers careful on Mason’s back—that Theo recognizes. That _Corey_ would recognize, if he knew enough. If he’d been given _time_ enough, and _training_ enough, Theo thinks, wincing, the fingers of his right hand flexing; the same fingers he’d used to pump Corey and the rest of the chimeras full of serum when he’d brought them back to life, and the same fingers he’d used to take that life _back_ when he’d turned on first Josh, and then Tracy. And so Theo looks Corey in the eye, and explains:

“You can do more than just turn invisible.”

\---

Theo wakes up early the next morning, bleary-eyed and exhausted from having only gotten back maybe two hours ago, to Argent standing over him, hands in his pockets and an idle, curious expression on his face.

“Scott mentioned you haven’t been sleeping well,” he observes when he sees Theo blinking up at him. “Why is that?”

Theo forces a scowl onto his face even as he feels _fear_ bolt down his spine and then spread, instantly and insidiously, out through his sleep-heavy limbs. “Maybe I find the amenities in my prison cell a little lacking,” he croaks, lifting his arms up and out of his sheets so he can gesture to the air mattress below him and the bare walls of the apartment around him.

Argent smirks. “We could try an _actual_ prison cell, if you like,” he offers, and smirks wider when he apparently sees the line of Theo’s mouth tighten. But then he jerks his chin in a clear _get up_ gesture, the sharp humor falling away from his voice and posture as he says, “Let’s go. We’re going after Richmond.”

Theo blinks in surprise. “You’re letting me out of the city?”

Argent gives him an amused, knowing look. “No,” he denies simply. “You’re going to the Sheriff’s station to man the map and compass, help us track him if he starts to move.” He taps a toe against Theo’s air mattress, either purposefully ignoring or uncaring of the flare of disappointment that Theo can’t keep off his face. “If you want a shower, hurry up. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”

There’s a second hulking black SUV already parked in the Sheriff’s station lot when Theo pulls in just behind Argent’s own hulking black SUV, and Theo can hear Agent McCall even before he can see him.

“And how exactly am I supposed to explain our sudden discovery of a previously-successfully hidden murderer to the federal prosecutor, Noah?” Agent McCall is snapping as Theo and Argent come into the main bullpen, and approach the Sheriff’s office. “I can’t exactly tell her some friends of mine used a magic map and compass to track him down.”

“Tell her you got an anonymous tip,” Argent suggests, and not particularly nicely, as he and Theo enter the room. He smiles sharply at Agent McCall. “Isn’t that the usual go-to for you blue blood types when you’ve done something to get information that won’t survive scrutiny?”

Agent McCall sneers. “That’s a little rich, coming from someone who essentially amounts to a jumped-up _vigilante_.”

“Gentlemen,” the Sheriff says, interrupting, though his overly-mild tone strongly suggests he would have preferred saying _children_ instead. Theo tries to swallow his smirk, and from the dry look the Sheriff shoots him, doesn’t quite manage it; still, the Sheriff's lips twitch just slightly upward.

The ache at the base of Theo’s skull starts slow, and subtly enough, that it gets buried underneath everything else going on: Theo braced over the map and compass, Richmond’s multi-tool off to the side, and dutifully reporting every change in location or direction; Scott, Derek, Parrish, and Argent on speakerphone as they close in on Richmond’s position; Agent McCall standing by with one hand impatiently on his phone as he waits for the opportunity to send his own team in. At first Theo thinks it’s just his position—head dropped low between his bracing arms for too long, his shoulders too tense as anticipation winches tighter all along his spine—but two hours in it suddenly blossoms into _pain_ , Theo letting loose a helpless grunt and bringing a hand up to press reflexively at the aching knot.

The Sheriff squints at him. “Theo?”

“I’m fine,” Theo says, though he says it through gritted teeth, and almost immediately has to curl further over the desk as the pain crests, and more strongly. “I’m fine, it’s just—”

 _Mason_ , he thinks, and gives another wounded, bitten-off cry as the pain crests _again_. He can see his nails digging into the wood of the Sheriff’s desk, and if he doesn’t take them away soon he’s going to put his claws through the wood; he can feel his fingertips aching. Then he nearly does it _anyway_ , because he feels cool fingers on the back of his neck.

“I didn’t think werewolves could _get_ migraines,” the Sheriff comments, now stood by Theo and with his tone a masterful mix of laconically mild and potentially concerned; letting Theo pick which one he wanted to seize on.

Theo picks the former, as best he can. “I’m not a werewolf, remember?” He reminds the Sheriff through gritted teeth, and then has to brace himself against a reflexive convulsion as pain rolls through him in an agonizing wave out from the base of his skull.

“Should I call Liam?” The Sheriff asks, apparently ignoring Theo’s attempted deflection to pick the latter on his own initiative. Theo stares at him, thrown enough and just the slightest bit senselessly _panicked_ , before the Sheriff clarifies, “To do the pain-draining thing.” He wiggles the fingers of one hand demonstratively.

“No,” Theo gasps, relieved. “No, I just—” He feels his phone sitting heavy in his pocket. “I’ve got something for it in my truck,” he improvises wildly. “Can I—?”

They’re in the middle of the hunt for Richmond. Theo’s technically the only one who knows how to operate the map and compass. The Sheriff nods, regardless. “Go,” he says. “Argent and the others are still getting into position, and I think I can manage staring at an unmoving dot on a map and a stationary compass arrow for a few minutes by myself.”

Theo attempts a grateful smile and mostly only manages a grimace, which the Sheriff returns. He also makes like he was going to gesture to one of his deputies to help escort Theo out, so Theo straightens up, best he can, and shakes his head, starts stumbling towards the door. Agent McCall is eyeing him thoughtfully as he goes but Theo doesn’t have time to try and address his too-sharp curiosity; he can feel another wave of pain gathering.

He makes it to his truck and has just slammed his door shut when it breaks. Theo curls over his steering wheel with a helpless cry and rides it out, his body convulsing in uneven, unpredictable intervals. Finally it subsides, and Theo—panting and shaking and _sweating_ —can fumble his phone out of his pocket, and dial the unsaved set of seven digits for Corey’s burner phone, before he puts it on speakerphone and tosses it onto the seat next to him. He puts his head back down against the steering wheel as it rings, just trying to concentrate on breathing.

Corey answers _fast_. “Theo?”

“What’s going on?” Theo demands, and has to gasp out a harsh, high sound as the pain briefly flares. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Wait, how did you…?” Corey starts to ask, and then apparently decides he doesn’t care— _gift horses_ —and abruptly changes tack. “I didn’t want to call, I didn’t know who you were with, but Theo,” he says, all in a rush, “you have to _get_ here. You have to _do_ something!”

“I can’t,” Theo answers immediately, and adds before the protest he _knows_ is gathering in Corey’s throat can explode out of it. “Corey, you _know_ I can’t. I try to come now and I get caught. We _both_ —we _all_ —get caught.”

Corey makes a high, distressed noise. “Fuck. _Fuck_ ,” and then: “Oh, Mason. Shit.”

There’s a loud, plasticky clatter—Corey had dropped his cheap burner phone. Theo bites off a curse and snaps _Corey_ , but Corey’s not listening; he can hear scrabbling through the line and—and the sound of _retching_ , visceral and painful-sounding. Gritting his teeth and trying to think past both the agony flaring outwards from the top of his spine and his own frustration with Corey’s behavior, Theo closes his eyes and _concentrates_ , prodding at the _awareness_ buried deep underneath the pain as he tries to uncover the actual shape of it.

 _Oh_ , he realizes: _oh_.

“Corey,” he half-yells, desperate to get Corey’s attention through the dropped phone and Corey’s clear focus on Mason to the near-exclusion of all else. “Corey, you’ve got to knock him out.”

There’s more scrabbling; the scrape of it against Theo’s already-sensitive eardrums is _agonizing_. “What?” Corey finally manages breathlessly as he picks up the phone and puts it back to his ear.

“You have the last of the anesthesia analog from last night, right?” Theo says, and then continues on without waiting for Corey to confirm; they’re running out of _time_. “ _Knock him out_.”

“I—I don’t,” Corey stammers.

“ _Corey_ ,” Theo interrupts. “It’s the shift, right? He keeps shifting uncontrollably?” Theo again doesn’t wait for Corey to respond; he knows he’s right, and is already cursing himself for his own stupidity besides. “He doesn’t have any conscious control over it, and he keeps getting triggered,” he explains, rapid-fire. “With the treatments I’ve been giving him, he’s now _physically_ strong enough to manage the shift, but _not_ strong enough to do it over and over again. Corey, it _will_ kill him if this keeps up. _Knock him out_.”

“Fuck,” Corey snarls. “ _Fuck_.”

There’s another clatter as Corey apparently drops his phone again, and a pounding that gets steadily more distant as he retreats away from it; Corey going to retrieve the last of the anesthesia analog that Theo had left with him. Theo finds himself sincerely wishing that Corey had taken his phone _with_ him, because left on the ground wherever it is Theo can hear the awful, _awful_ sounds of Mason groaning and panting and _dying_ ; dying as the shift kills him.

But finally there’s another muted explosion of noise, and a sharp ringing; glass striking the floor, though not hard enough to break. Theo can hear Corey muttering to himself, and to Mason, as he apparently works to get the glass vial full of analog positioned and a syringe inside it, and then—and then _begging_ as Corey pleads with Mason to hang on, and stay still; Theo squeezes his eyes shut as guilt twists throughout his locked and aching limbs.

But after ten, fifteen, twenty seconds, the agony at the base of Theo’s skull starts to lessen, and fade, until finally it levels out into a low, throbbing ache. Theo exhales out heavily and collapses down against his steering wheel, his arms and legs and fingers starting to tremble in the sudden absence of pain. There’s another stretch of silence—Corey apparently watching Mason to make sure the analog had taken—and then another scraping burst of fumbling as he picks his phone back up.

Shaky as he is—his thoughts as muddled as they are—Theo isn’t expecting Corey’s accusation.

“You fucking _liar_ ,” he hisses, and Theo freezes, even alone in his truck. “You said he was getting _better!_ ”

He’d started out saying it low and with a forced sort of neutral tone, but he’s yelling by the end; Theo flinches, and hard.

“I’m sorry,” he says, immediately and reflexively and _sincerely_. “Corey, I’m sorry, I didn’t think—” He cuts himself off, frustrated with his own excuses. “Look. He’s not a born or bitten wolf, he’s a _chimera_. I should have known his control would be nonexistent. Keep him sedated and I’ll be there as soon as I can, okay?”

“You mean you’ll be here _tonight_ ,” Corey sneers. “As in, like twelve hours from now.” Underneath the anger Theo can hear the fear, and he closes his eyes and lets his forehead thunk down against the top of his steering wheel.

“I’m at the station,” he tries to explain. “Argent and Scott and everyone, they’re in the middle of going after one of Monroe’s top people, and Argent ordered me to help. Corey, I _can’t_. Not without exposing myself.”

 _Not without exposing_ you, he thinks, but doesn’t say.

“Fine,” Corey spits, and Theo realizes what he’s about to do seconds before he does it. “Whatever.” He hangs up; Theo grits his teeth and narrowly resists the urge to punch a hand against his steering wheel. Instead he forces himself to take a deep breath, in for a count of seven, and then forces himself to exhale it just as slowly back out.

When he gets back into the station, and into the Sheriff’s office, the Sheriff and Agent McCall are both bent over the map, though they both look up when he steps inside the room. Theo starts to tense up at the attention, and then nearly stops himself, and then stops himself from stopping himself; he lets the exhaustion and the remnants of pain still carved deep into the corners of his lips, his eyes, show.

“The joys of being a knock-off werewolf,” he tells them, and shrugs.

There’s still curiosity in their eyes, and not a little suspicion, but they’re in the middle of an active hunt; almost instantly their attention flickers back down to the map as the tiny dot representing Richmond starts to move. It flickers to the compass, whose arrows start to spin.

“Head east,” the Sheriff says into his desk phone, the speakerphone light still lit up. “Richmond’s on the move.”

\---

Theo’s dreading his reception when he gets to the doorway of the vacation home that Corey and Mason are, strictly speaking, squatting in, but he needn’t have worried; Corey isn’t there to greet him, fondly or otherwise.

He isn’t in the kitchen, either, or in any of the overdecorated bedrooms, and neither is Mason. Theo stands in the doorway of the back door for a few seconds, lip between his teeth, and then he follows his nose—and the omnipresent throb at the base of his skull—and heads for the basement.

Corey’s there, and absorbed enough in watching Mason—laid out in the bar area on a crude recreation of a mattress, the cushions from the couch across the way shoved together and covered by a blanket—that he doesn’t notice Theo coming down, at first. Instead he sits with arms wrapped around his folded-up legs, his chin propped on his knees, and just stares at the slow rise and fall of Mason’s chest. Theo hesitates, and then he raises a hand to the wall of the stairway, and knocks, gently.

Corey swears and topples over and then scrambles to his feet, all in the same breath, and then his eyes flick to Mason with enough panic on his face that it’s clear he’s worried about having woken him up. He only looks at Theo after Mason’s chest has risen and fallen a few more steady times, Mason still fast asleep; undisturbed. He doesn’t look for long, though; almost instantly he drops his eyes and his arms down, and scrubs his palms roughly over his thighs.

“Sorry, I should have told you…” Corey starts. “It’s just, the cool air down here. He was burning _up_ earlier, like some kind of crazy fever. I didn’t know what else…” He winces, and trails off, and glances up at Theo from underneath a ducked brow.

Theo doesn’t know what the hell is going on; this isn’t the reception he’d been expecting. “It’s fine,” he says slowly, after a second, then: “Good thinking.”

“Thanks,” Corey says, clearly on reflex, and then winces.

Theo’s almost grateful when Mason stirs, though just enough to shift on his makeshift-mattress and then roll over onto his side; it breaks up the awkward silence that he and Corey had fallen into, and gives Theo the excuse to come the rest of the way into the basement without further invitation. Corey doesn’t move as Theo passes him on the way to Mason, just stays standing off to the side with his scent such a riot that Theo gives up almost immediately on trying to untangle it; Corey would have to tell him what was going on his head, or not.

And surprisingly, he does.

“Look, Theo,” he blurts out, and Theo—already on his knees next to Mason’s head, his backpack by his hip—stops and twists around some to look at him. “I’m sorry about earlier.”

Theo stares. “ _You’re_ apologizing to _me?_ ” He asks incredulously, too thrown to stop himself from looking that gift horse right in the mouth.

Corey flinches, and then shrugs, and only then seems to fully realize that he’s awkwardly looming over Theo, and he spends a painfully obvious few seconds trying to decide where he should be instead before apparently giving up and staying right where he is.

“You’re doing the best you can,” Corey finally says, and Theo blinks. Corey’s lips flicker in a quick, there-and-gone half-smirk and he adds, a little slyly, “Well, unless you _have_ actually spent days and days trying to work a pseudo-medical miracle on one of the Dread Doctors victims before. In that case maybe you could, you know, do a little…” He falters, the rest of the attempted joke trailing off; Theo feels his heart—his _sister’s_ heart—twist in his chest.

“Nope, first time, here,” he replies lightly, picking up the scraps of the joke like an olive branch and holding them out; Corey’s lips flicker upwards, again, as he darts a look at Theo.

Then he shrugs, his arms coming up to cross protectively over his hunched-in chest. “You didn’t have to help us,” he acknowledges quietly. And then he blinks, and stops himself, and seemingly rewinds his own statement in his head before he corrects, “Well, I know you have to help us _now_ , since I’m, I’m—”

“Blackmailing me?” Theo offers dryly, and with an amount of good-natured humor that surprises even himself, and clearly Corey as well; Corey smiles, wide and helplessly in response, before forcibly pulling the expression off his face.

“But you didn’t have to help us _before_ ,” Corey concludes, picking back up on his point. “The—the first time. When you found us, originally. You could have just kept on pretending you didn’t know where we were, or that you couldn’t find us.”

 _No, I couldn’t have_ , Theo thinks, but doesn’t say, and with absolutely _no_ idea where the rock-solid certainty in his chest comes from.

“And I _know_ you didn’t do it for our sakes,” Corey continues, oblivious to Theo’s inner turmoil. “I know you did it for, for—” Theo preemptively winces, but Corey doesn’t finish that sentence, thank christ, just abruptly switches tracks. “But Mason would have died if you hadn’t, so…”

He trails off again. Theo swallows. _You’re welcome_ , he nearly says, but that seems somehow, subtly wrong, and so instead he just nods; Corey gives him another of those shy smiles.

Theo’s awkward acceptance of his awkward apology seems to be all Corey had needed to overcome his own anxiety; he scrambles forward, suddenly, until he can thunk himself down onto his knees next to Theo, and next to Mason. He reaches forward to lay a hand lightly over Mason’s forehead and sleep-furrowed brow, and then he leans around Theo some to peer inside Theo’s half-opened backpack.

“What’re those?” He asks, nodding towards the collection of glass vials lying half-uncovered in the sweatshirt Theo had wrapped them in to keep them from breaking. “Something—something that can help?” He wonders, the hope in his voice painfully obvious.

Theo takes pity on him, and carefully slides one of the vials free to offer it over. “They’re...supernatural immunosuppressants, essentially,” Theo explains, watching Corey’s face as he does; as Corey takes the vial. “Or they should be,” Theo corrects. “I tested them best I could this afternoon before coming, but…”

Corey nods, and thankfully doesn’t force Theo to finish that sentence, since it ends with _but I didn’t have a live subject to test them on_. He rolls the vial carefully from palm to palm, his eyes never leaving the shimmering liquid. “To keep him from shifting,” he interprets, and glances at Mason’s sleep-slack face.

“Almost,” Theo replies quietly. “They’re to keep him from shifting all the way. He still needs to be able to shift _some_.”

Corey’s brow furrows. “I thought you said the shift was killing him.”

“It was. It is,” Theo agrees, and exhales when Corey squints at him. But he doesn’t argue, or get angry, which is the second gift horse that Theo’s received tonight, and one whose mouth he has no intention of even _glancing_ at. “The Beast is a part of him now, Corey. There’s no undoing that. But the gulf between what the Beast’s abilities _demand_ of Mason’s body, and his body’s current capabilities are…large.”

Understanding dawns over Corey’s face, and Theo doesn’t totally understand the amusement that crinkles his eyes until he says, “You want him to do supernatural physical therapy.”

Theo rolls his eyes. “Sure. And _mental_ therapy, too, if you want to think of it like that. He’s got to learn control over the shift, just like any other shapeshifter.” Some of the amusement—amusement that had jumped helplessly from Corey to Theo—fades, and Theo sobers, a little. “The stakes are just—significantly higher, for him.” He sighs. “The serum in these vials should weaken his body enough to prevent the shift from fully taking over. That way Mason can practice controlling it, and his body can adjust and strengthen to handle it, without it doing irreversible damage to him.”

Corey nods to show he’s heard, and understood, even though his eyes are still fixed on the vial he’s still rolling around his palms. And then Mason snuffles some in his sleep, and Theo has to swear and whip out a hand to catch the vial before it can shatter as it drops through Corey’s suddenly-immaterial, wraithlike hand.

“...you’ve been practicing,” Theo observes blankly in the stunned silence that follows, his eyes flicking up to Corey’s chagrined face from his once-more solid hands.

Corey grimaces, and shakes out the offending hand. “There wasn’t much else to do while waiting for you, and panicking that there wasn’t going to be enough anesthesia to _keep him alive_ ,” Corey says crabbily, and a little defensively; Theo winces. Corey catches it, and winces, too. “It was a good distraction,” he adds more quietly, and like an apology.

Theo swallows, and looks away. “I would have come earlier if I could,” he murmurs, hating how much it sounds like an excuse.

But Corey just says, soft and sincere, “I know.” And then, like he’s passing back the olive branch that Theo had offered to him, earlier: “Did you—did you and Argent and the others, did you get Monroe’s lieutenant, or whatever?”

“Yes,” Theo agrees. “And no.” He can’t help but grin, weakly, at the irritation that flashes briefly across Corey’s face. “Richmond. He was—determined not to get caught,” Theo explains quietly. “He nearly killed Derek. Parrish and Argent—” Theo winces as it occurs to him, too late, that this story might not help soothe Corey’s admittedly reasonable concerns about Argent, “—didn’t have much choice.”

“Oh,” Corey responds, apparently correctly extrapolating out the rest of the events. His expression twists, briefly, but he doesn’t comment, triumphantly or otherwise. Instead he frowns. “Does that mean that we’re—that _Scott—_ ” Theo just barely manages to keep himself from flinching at Corey’s quick, stammering correction, “—is back to square one in trying to find Monroe?”

“No,” Theo disagrees, and grins gently when Corey glances over at him. “They found where he’d been staying. If anything he had there belonged to Monroe…”

“...the map and compass can find her,” Corey finishes, and grins helplessly back. “Good,” he whispers, his eyes drifting from Theo’s to Mason. “Good.”

Theo watches him for a few seconds, and then he straightens up, some. “C’mon,” he says, and nods towards Mason when Corey looks back at him. “He’s going to wake up soon, right? I’ll show you what he’ll need to do.”

\---

“I’m aware that this is preferable to the alternative,” the Sheriff observes as he, Argent, Derek, Scott, and Agent McCall all stand around his desk staring down at the twelve distinct dots spread throughout the map, “and yet.”

Argent blows out a long, slow exhale. “It’s going to take us days to run down these leads, figure out who’s who.”

“It’d go faster if you’d let me help,” Theo comments idly from his place lounged back on the couch against the back wall of the Sheriff’s office; he meets Argent’s eyes when Argent glances back at him, and smirks.

Argent snorts. “I think that’s called ‘trading one problem for another,’” he replies just as mildly, and turns back to the map.

Scott frowns. “I thought the bracelet allowed you to track him,” he points out, curious and with just the slightest hint of a potential rebuke hidden in the question, “even if the wards weren’t up, and he _could_ leave the city.”

“Sure,” Argent answers, unfazed by Scott’s tone and unmoved by his logic, “if I thought that there wasn’t something, _somewhere_ , that he knows about and could use to get the bracelet off his wrist before we could track him back down, and that he’s _conveniently_ failed to mention.”

Theo has to fight not to tense up. His left hand doesn’t _actually_ ache—it’d healed perfectly every time he’d broken it, if slowly—but sometimes there’s a phantom soreness to it, an odd twinge like sense-memory, and one that’s always accompanied by the soft feel of leather like the bracelet sliding down and free of his arm; of his body. Still, he can’t stop himself from rubbing at it, his right thumb stroking over the deceptively simple width of it.

When he looks up, Scott is studying him. “Well, what if we—”

“It’s not worth the risk,” Argent interrupts, though gently. “Between us and your dad’s people, we have more than enough bodies to run these leads down outside of Beacon Hills. And Theo—” here he pauses, and raises his voice; Theo forces himself to look up, and meet his gaze, “—can be just as useful _here_ , helping coordinate.”

Argent is right, in that it does take days. And he’s also right, in that Theo does turn out to be useful at the Sheriff’s station, Theo and the Sheriff acting as a makeshift sort of headquarters and coordinating the various teams running around.

“Yes, Your Honor. My team is already in place and ready to go, once we have the warrant,” Agent McCall says, mid-morning the second day and unsuccessfully trying to angle his body away from Argent—who’s drinking a cup of coffee and quietly talking with Derek over the map—as he reluctantly adds, “An anonymous tip, Your Honor.”

Argent smirks; Theo can see it from his place on the Sheriff’s couch, legs stretched out and with his face propped up on one hand as he fights to stay awake.

 _Look,_ Corey had said last night—or early this morning, depending—his palms flexing and unflexing after his latest round of activating, and deactivating his newfound abilities. Sat across from him in the vacation home’s living room, Mason had been concentrating on shifting his claws finger by finger in a prickly wave, his tongue between his teeth as he’d stared down at them. _Why don’t you sleep for a few hours? I think we can handle doing our_ exercises _—_ here he’d smirked, though not maliciously _—without supervision, and we can wake you up if we need you._

 _I’m fine_ , Theo had replied dismissively.

 _You’re a shitty liar_ , Corey had countered bluntly, just as Mason had said, _Really? Because you look like you’re going to fall over_.

Theo had slept.

Not enough, though, apparently; he spends the rest of that day, and the next, desperately struggling to keep his eyes open, and his mind on the hunt. More than once he falls asleep in the terrible, angular chairs in front of the Sheriff’s desk, or on the couch in his office, and jolts awake bleary-eyed and confused as something clatters, or someone yells out in the main body of the station.

Or the Sheriff nudges him gently, hand always outstretched with a mug of strong-smelling black coffee.

“I know,” he’d said the first time, before Theo could remind him that caffeine would do absolutely _nothing_ to help Theo stay awake, given his chimera metabolism, “but why don’t we pretend otherwise and call it a psychosomatic treatment. For _both_ of us,” he’d added wryly, “I’m getting tired just watching you.”

Theo had taken it after a few stunned seconds of surprise. And while the caffeine _hadn’t_ done shit to help him stay awake, the spoonfuls of sugar that the Sheriff had clearly loaded it with _had_ ; Theo had spent the rest of the day sneaking glances at him, unsettled.

He’s just leaving the station the third night, the collar of his jacket turned up against the chill as the sun finishes setting low over the horizon and the temperature drops in turn, when his phone buzzes. _Come over_ , Liam’s text reads: _My dad’s grilling, we need the extra mouth_.

Theo frowns down at his phone. Probably Liam just isn’t thinking, but there’s a flicker of intuition in the back of Theo’s mind that says it’s something else; Liam’s white-knuckled finger pressed up against the shimmering barrier of the wards locking Theo in his apartment as he’d confessed _it bothers me_.

 _Are you under a rock right now?_ He eventually sends back, stood just outside the station door. _Look outside, it’s nearly dark_.

He slips his phone back into his pocket and starts heading for his truck, already trying to calculate how many hours of sleep he could slip in before he needed to leave to get to Corey and Mason. Not nearly enough, regardless, but maybe he could catch a few more on the surprisingly comfortable couch in the vacation home’s living room; firmly in reach if they needed him, but otherwise chipping away at his massive—and only increasing—sleep debt.

Except his phone rings.

“I made a deal with your parole officer,” is the first thing Liam says when Theo begrudgingly picks up, Liam apparently dispensing with any sort of polite greeting. “So stop being a dick, and come over.”

Theo stops, his phone pressed to his ear and halfway into his truck. “...you did what?”

He doesn’t need to see Liam to know that he just rolled his eyes. “Argent,” he clarifies, and then repeats, “I made a deal. You come over and eat, and then Scott comes and picks you up, takes you back, and puts up the wards. Like an exception for a special occasion to your sentence, or whatever.”

“And what’s the occasion?” Theo wonders dryly, still poised half-in and half-out of his truck, one arm draped over the door and his other elbow braced on the roof. “And why the hell would Argent agree, anyway?”

“The occasion is that I am a _saint_ of a human being. Well, werewolf. Whatever,” Liam replies, piously at first and then a little more normally. “And as for Argent, I’m pretty sure he agreed primarily to get a reprieve from me constantly harassing him to agree.”

“Your skills at diplomacy are truly unmatched,” Theo observes wryly, but he’s smiling, and there’s no way Liam can’t hear it in his voice.

“You’re welcome,” Liam shoots back instantly, and with a grin just as clear in his voice. “See you soon, I’ll leave the front door unlocked.”

The front door is indeed unlocked, and Theo can smell the rich scents of grilling meat and vegetables even before he reaches it. Mrs. Geyer pokes her head out of the kitchen when she hears the front door open and waves as Theo steps inside and closes the door behind him, but Theo’s quick-fire smile and attempted polite greeting are almost instantly overwhelmed by the sound of Liam thundering down the stairs.

“Hey,” he says when he hops with both feet down onto the landing, his lips pulled wide in a crinkle-eyed grin.

“Hi,” Theo replies inanely, and with a helpless, answering smile taking over his own face.

Theo ends up taking over fruit-for-the-fruit-salad chopping duties from Mrs. Geyer after offering, and then charmingly insisting, to help. Liam gets conscripted into watching the biscuits cooking in the oven and, surprising precisely no one, ends up almost entirely forgetting about them until first Theo and then Liam smell the smoke. Theo ends up wedging himself in a corner and trying and failing to smother his laughter as Liam yanks the offending biscuits out of the oven, all while yelling entirely ineffective assurances that _everything’s fine, it’s fine_ , over his shoulder at his bemused, longsuffering parents.

It’s a nice night.

Still, Theo—that flicker of intuition from before becoming an outright, steady burn—eventually exhales out low, and slow, and nudges Liam, the two of them stood side-by-side later and washing the last of the dishes. Liam shoots him a curious look.

“Call Scott,” he orders quietly; the line of Liam’s mouth goes mulish.

“Why?” He demands, his transparent attempt at cluelessness just twisting his words up worse. “Night’s not over, Argent said—”

“Don’t push your luck,” Theo interrupts. And then, because he _knows_ Liam; has known him since Liam first pulled him out of the ground; since Theo found himself wandering around after Liam to keep his worst impulses from rendering his best intentions moot, he adds, “Don’t push _my_ luck.”

Liam shuts his mouth, though he can’t quite hide the way his expression spasms, regardless of how fast he tries to look away.

Theo goes to wait out on the porch, somehow certain that his being in eyesight when Liam makes the call will somehow make Liam’s current battle of wills with Argent—and by extension, Scott—worse. Even still he can’t help stretching out his hearing to catch the rapid beat of Liam’s heart, the harsh rasp to his frustrated breathing and the sharp stab of consonants as Liam tells Scott that Theo’s ready for a pick-up, Scott’s reply careful and gentle and clearly aware of Liam’s—his beta’s—distress. Liam hangs up without saying goodbye.

“Scott’s on his way,” he says unnecessarily when he steps out onto the porch to join Theo; he doesn’t look at Theo as he says it, his eyes fixed out into the middle distance as he pulls the door shut behind himself.

“Thanks,” Theo murmurs, and doesn’t mean for the update; Liam looks at him sharply.

Theo lets him, and Liam studies him for a few long seconds before he suddenly laughs, exhales out roughly as he shakes out his arms; Theo frowns at him. Liam spots it, and shakes his head, still laughing quietly.

“Sorry,” he says quickly, before Theo can ask what he’s laughing about. “It’s just, thank _you_.” He quirks Theo a tiny grin. “That’s what tonight was supposed to be about,” he says, and then—frowning some, and muttering it, almost to himself: “At least part of it, anyway.”

Theo hesitates, confused and a little wary—he can’t help thinking of Corey and Mason, though there’s no way that Liam could know about them—but his curiosity gets the best of him. “Thank me for what?”

Liam sobers some, his jaw clenching but not with anger as he glances back over at Theo. “I know no one has said it, and they probably won’t,” he answers, “but we’d be a lot more fucked in trying to find Monroe without you. The map and compass _alone_ …” he trails off, and then looks away, and shrugs. “And the sooner we find her,” he adds, more quietly, “the sooner the Sheriff and Argent and everybody can actually focus on finding Mason and Corey.”

His scent starts to burn in Theo’s nose, harsh and bitter. Theo swallows. “I don’t think I get credit for something I’m being forced into doing,” he counters gently, and holds up his braceleted wrist.

Liam glances at it, and then at Theo, and then he scoffs and looks away, shaking his head. “That’s not why you’re doing it.”

Theo’s expression—and thoughts—blank with surprise, but he manages to recover quickly, though his wry tone wavers more than he’d like as he replies, “Oh, it isn’t?”

“No,” Liam says simply, and smirks when Theo’s eyes narrow. He glances away again. “I know what you look like when you’re being forced into something, remember?” He reminds Theo, and Theo doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about until Liam holds up both of his hands, the sides of his wrists together, and then he does; the time Liam had shackled him to a chain and dragged him around to force him to help with the Wild Hunt. Liam shakes his head again, and concludes, “This isn’t it.”

Theo stares. But fortunately—or unfortunately, depending—headlights swing around to illuminate Liam’s street as a car turns towards them, and Theo recognizes the creaky, bass rumble of the Jeep. Liam smirks again, though there’s something tucked in its corners that Theo doesn’t have time to dig out before Liam is tapping a toe against the porch and then turning for the front door.

“Night, Theo,” is all he says, barely pausing to meet Theo’s eyes as he shoulders open the door.

Theo watches it close behind him. He must spend longer staring at it than he thinks, because Scott flashes the Jeep’s lights twice; Theo raises a hand and flicks it in acknowledgement.

“Night, Liam,” he murmurs eventually, and then he turns to jog down the steps towards the waiting Jeep.

\---

“This is so fucking weird,” Corey comments a few hours later, his hands outstretched in front of him to lay palm-to-palm with Theo’s, he and Mason and Theo all sat cross-legged in a loose circle in the kitchen of the vacation home.

“Stop stalling,” Theo orders, his lips twitching despite himself.

Corey makes a face. But he also closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath, concentration furrowing his brow and his mouth starting to twist in a reflexive grimace. Theo braces himself, locking his arms in position to try and head off what he’s sure is going to be an instinctive jerk away.

But all at once Corey snatches his hands back away from Theo’s as he says, all in a freaked-out rush, “No, no, no. I can’t. No. This is too weird. Also _dangerous_. What if I lose control? You’d lose a lot more than just your pride in being a good teacher, or whatever.”

“That’s why we’re in the kitchen,” Theo assures him, and leans forward so that he can retrieve Corey’s curled-up hands and drag them back into position. “You end up pulling some of my tendons or veins out through my palms or whatever, it’ll be an easy clean-up on the tile.”

He manages to keep a straight face when he first says it, but can’t help bursting out laughing at the horrified look that immediately crosses Corey’s face. “Fuck you!” Corey squawks, just as Mason punches Theo in the arm and chastises, “Theo!,” but with the effect ruined somewhat by his own helpless laughter.

Theo forces himself to sober, his fingers still locked loosely but firmly around Corey’s wrists to hold them in place. “C’mon,” he tells Corey. “You can do this. You’re already a natural with physical objects, it’s the same basic idea.”

He flattens his palms back out underneath Corey’s balled-up fists, and smiles at him when Corey darts a skeptical, nervous glance at him. “It is _not_ the same basic idea, you psychopath,” he mutters darkly, but he slowly lets his fingers uncurl until they’re once more palm-to-palm.

Theo waits. He can feel Corey’s anxiety like a prickling sensation at the base of his own skull, present and persistent, and markedly different from Mason’s calm curiosity and overwhelming fondness as he smiles encouragingly at Corey when Corey darts a look at _him_ , instead. It helps, that smile; Theo can feel it in the way that the prickling lessens, and fades, though it stays low and simmering; Corey’s potential panic banked, for the moment, but still ready to flare right back up.

“Okay,” he mutters to himself, and his eyes drift closed again. “Okay, alright.”

Theo forgets to brace this time and _does_ jerk backwards. But it doesn’t _matter_ , because Corey instinctually follows him, leaning forward over his own knees and with his wraithlike hands wrapped firmly around—not around, _inside of_ —Theo’s wrists. All three of them stare.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Corey breathes, and Mason exhales out a shaky, surprised sound. Theo for his part stays very, very still, stunned even beyond his own poking and prodding of Corey into attempting exactly what he’s doing at the sight of his own skin, and flesh, weaved around and between the transparent grip of Corey’s ghosted hands.

And then intuition flares at the back of his mind—at the base of his skull—and he yanks his hands away a split second before Corey loses his hold on his abilities, and his flesh becomes instantly solid again.

“Holy shit!” Corey shouts, half-panicked and half-triumphant. He darts a look up at Theo, and then laughs immediately afterwards—high and disbelieving—once he sees that Theo is fine. He brings his once-more solid hands up to rake back through his hair as he demands, “Did you _see_ that?,” and only then seems to fully register the touch of his own fingers. He yanks them out of his hair and stares at them for a few seconds like they maybe belonged to someone else, and then he wiggles them a bit and exclaims once more, “Holy shit!”

He looks at Mason and laughs again, holding out his hands between them as if to show them to Mason. Mason huffs out a laugh and takes hold of them, his fingers wrapping tight around the bundle of each of Corey’s, and squeezes. “I saw,” he confirms. “You did it!”

Corey’s answering grin is blinding, and paired with the solar-flare of warmth that blossoms out from the top of Theo’s spine out through his limbs, nearly overwhelming; Theo looks away, his own lips curled up in a helpless smile, as Corey tackles Mason in a lunging hug and buries the rest of his disbelieving laughter in Mason’s neck.

Corey asks to practice again, and then again, managing to hold the wraithlike shift for longer, and then longer, each time. But by the third sweat starts to bead at his temples, and Theo can _see_ his fingers shaking—even if he can’t feel them, Corey’s ghosted hand resting, impossibly, right inside his own—and he gently withdraws his arms.

“Good,” he murmurs, when Corey glances up at him, his head ducked low as he works to catch his breath. “That was really good, Corey.”

“I could feel your _bones_ ,” Corey confesses, his voice filled with wonder. “It felt like—like I could have _grabbed_ them, if I wanted. Like I could have—could have…”

“Pulled them out?” Theo supplies dryly, and shifting so that he can rest one of his elbows on a bent knee. “You could have. That’s the design, the point.”

Corey looks thoughtfully down at his palms, and flexes his fingers a few times. “I don’t know of any animals—cameleons or otherwise—who ghost through other living creatures’ bodies as a defense _or_ hunting mechanism,” he observes, and with a secretive little smile darted up at Theo.

“And I don’t know of any wolves who can heal from a broken neck,” Theo shoots back, though it loses some of its force as his jaw cracks on a yawn. He shakes his head briskly, once the yawn’s done, and advises, “Don’t overthink it.”

“Spooky moon magic,” Mason opines sagely; Theo snorts a laugh.

He also glances at the clock above the microwave. “I should get going.”

Corey starts to nod, and then he blanches, and swears; Theo eyes him curiously. The blanch becomes a flush. “Sorry, it’s just, I was going to ask,” he explains. “Do you…could you…? I was going to run to the store.”

Corey had provided maybe three-quarters of an explanation and no actual request; Theo gets what he’s asking anyway. He looks at the clock again, and calculates; he’ll be cutting it close, but.

“Yeah,” he tells Corey. “I can stay while you go.”

Across from them both, Mason huffs and flops back onto his elbows. “I don’t _actually_ need a babysitter,” he reminds them, exasperated, and purposefully redistributes his weight so that he can wiggle clawed fingers at them; so that he can bare a mouthful of sharp fangs. Then he lets the shift fade, easy and with none of the tremors, or suddenly-bloody noses, of before.

Corey ducks his head, and then ducks in for a kiss, but doesn’t actually rescind his request to Theo. Mason rolls his eyes, but gestures for him to go. Corey scrambles to his feet.

“Here,” Theo says, twisting around and then stretching backwards for his jacket, left folded by the kitchen doorway. “My truck’s faster and less suspicious than that stolen junker you’ve been driving around—” He ignores Corey’s guilty, embarrassed flush, “—and there’s this.”

He pulls three twenties out of his wallet, and holds out both the folded bunch of them and his keys to Corey, who frowns and doesn’t reach for either.

“Where’d you get that kind of cash?” He asks dubiously; Theo rolls his eyes.

“I lifted it from Derek,” Theo tells him; Corey and Mason both give him strange, slightly horrified looks, so Theo huffs and explains, “If he doesn’t assume Cora took it, he’ll assume Peter did. And before either of you bleeding hearts tries to moralize, try to remember that he owns a _building_. He’s not hurting for sixty bucks.”

Corey’s lips twitch, and he takes both keys and cash. “I’m sure he’d see it that way.”

“Let’s _never find out_ ,” Theo mutters, and tips his head back to watch Corey as he disappears with a last, quiet _see you in a bit_ to Mason.

Mason does the same, and then—once they’ve both heard the side door close behind Corey, and the roar of Theo’s truck starting up—he turns back to Theo, and smiles. “Thanks for that.”

Theo nearly says _for what_ , but Mason gives him such a dry, unimpressed look before he can that he clicks his teeth back closed around the words. Laughing a little, Mason rolls upright, and starts picking at his nails.

“I know the stealing he’s had to do bothers him. The food, and that car, and this,” he gestures around to the house. As he lets his arms fall his eyes come to rest on Theo’s face, thoughtful and a little sharp—a little penetrating—if not unfriendly. “And clearly I’m not the only one who noticed.”

Theo doesn’t know what to say, so he just shrugs, and looks away. But he hears Mason’s quiet huff of laughter regardless, and can’t stop his lips from twitching. Finally he straightens up, too, and then leans forward with his hands outstretched, palms up.

“Give me your hands,” he instructs. “Let’s see how you’re doing.”

Mason runs through the exercises Theo had devised while Theo watches carefully, his eyes on the veins beneath Mason’s skin even as Mason is flick-flick-flicking out his claws finger by finger, holding the shift on one, and then the other; on all of them, and then none. His veins stay the same pale, healthy color, no trace of black sickness spreading out through his palms or wrists, and Theo feels relief flow liquid down the back of his spine, cool and comforting. When he glances up at Mason, Mason bares a mouthful of fangs at him, the pull of his mouth crinkling his eyes up; there’s no trace of black sickness around his lips, or jaw, either; Theo smiles back.

He goes to release Mason’s hands, and lean back; he’d left his backpack by his jacket. “Looks good. _Really_ good. I think we can lower—” He starts to say, and then he stops on a harsh gasp, _pain_ lancing up from his wrists.

When he looks back at Mason, his eyes are filled corner to corner with glowing, pale blue light, and the expression surrounding his sharp, shifted fangs is no longer a friendly grin but a snarl.

Theo holds his pinioned wrists—the tips of Mason’s claws long enough to almost be punching _through_ his flesh—very still. “Mason,” he says, just as carefully, and forces himself to meet Mason’s glowing eyes; to ignore the threat of his fangs just below them.

Mason’s shoulders heave with his unsteady, uneven breathing, and his fingers spasm around Theo’s wrists. Theo can’t help it; he grits out a pained sound as Mason’s claws saw deeper into his wrists, against his bones. There’s a pool of blood growing between their crossed legs, dripping down and down from their macabrely joined hands.

“ _Mason_ ,” Theo hisses again, more forcefully this time, agony like _fire_ consuming his forearms and climbing steadily up past his elbows.

Mason blinks, once, and then again, and when he opens his eyes up the second time the pale blue is gone.

“Oh,” he breathes. “Oh, oh my _god_.”

He yanks his hands away from Theo’s, too fast. His claws rip free of Theo’s flesh and Theo makes another helpless, hurt sound and hunches reflexively over, though he leaves his wrists where they are; he can’t afford to ruin another pair of jeans. Nausea swims in his gut and he has to close his eyes and breathe through it, feeling his hands trembling in mid-air as his healing slowly, slowly struggles to fix the damage.

It means he has to ignore Mason chanting his name, higher and more panicked each time, until finally he can swallow, once, hard, and grit out, “Mason. _Mason_. I’m fine.”

“You’re _not_ ,” Mason counters immediately, high and distressed; when Theo forces his head up to look at him, Mason is looking at where his wrists are still dripping blood onto the floor below them.

Theo grimaces, but there isn’t a whole lot to be done about the grisly sight for the moment. “It’s because the Beast was—is—essentially an alpha in its own right,” he tries to explain. “They’ll just take longer to heal.”

Theo stays seated as he waits for them to do exactly that, but Mason seemingly can’t; he scrambles to his feet, his hands—his _bloody_ hands—over his mouth. He only seems to fully realize that after he’s already pressed them to his lips, though, and he makes a sound just as hurt as Theo’s had been and jerks them away, looking horrified.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I don’t know what—” Mason starts to apologize, and Theo had been planning this conversation out in his head for a while—had known it was coming, had tried to _prepare_ —but he’s tired, and in pain, and he responds more sharply than he’d intended.

“Yes, you do,” he interrupts with a heartfelt, if unintentional, glare. He blinks it away fast when Mason cuts off in the middle of his frantic apology, his mouth left hanging open. Sighing, Theo struggles to his feet—his bloody wrists held out, and away, from his body—and starts making his unsteady way over to the kitchen sink. “Yes, you do,” he repeats more quietly; more gently.

He flicks on the water and in doing so almost drowns out Mason’s stammering denial. “No, I—”

“Mason,” Theo cuts him off again, and then hisses as the warm water streams over the damage still sluggishly closing on his wrists. “This isn’t the first time you’ve taken a swing at me,” Theo reminds him.

It’s just the first time one had _landed;_ Theo scrubs roughly at the blood on his skin, silently berating himself for so stupidly letting his guard down.

“You said that was just my instincts,” Mason protests, still hovering awkwardly where he’d rocketed to his feet. “The last time you said it was because you’d surprised me, coming around the corner like that.”

“It _is_ your instincts,” Theo agrees, shutting off the water. He looks down at his wrists but they aren’t healed yet, so he leaves them braced over the middle of the sink and tries to ignore the tickling sensation of blood still running over and dripping off of his skin. “ _Your_ instincts. _Yours_. Which you keep trying to treat like _someone else’s_.”

Like _Sebastian Valet’s_ , Theo thinks, but doesn’t say. When he glances over his shoulder at Mason, still leaned over the sink on his forearms, Mason has a pinched, guilty look on his face; he has some idea, at least, about what Theo is getting at.

“Maybe I don’t want them to be mine,” he mutters, his arms rising to cross instinctually over his chest; Theo starts to say his name, a warning—Mason’s fingers still covered in Theo’s blood—but Mason realizes his own error before he can, and stops. Theo smothers a wince as Mason’s scent flares and then tanks again.

“Mason,” he starts to say quietly, but Mason talks over him.

“I _remember_ ,” he tells Theo, loud and then louder even though Theo isn’t trying to stop him, to interrupt him. “I remember what it was like to…what it was like _when_ …” He looks down at his currently-human—and currently bloody—fingers, and flexes them. Finally he sighs, and tucks the tips of his fingers up tight against his palms. “Every time I shift I remember. I can’t help it.”

Theo can’t keep looking at him. He looks back down at his wrists. It’s hard to tell if the punctures are still there under the wet sheen of water and blood and so Theo reaches forward, swipes a thumb carefully over his opposite wrist; his skin is whole, even if he can feel the internal damage still knitting together. Letting his head drop low on his neck, Theo exhales out quietly, and then he braces his palms on the edge of the sink.

“I’m sorry this happened to you.” _I’m sorry I helped_ make _this happen to you_ , he thinks, but doesn’t say. He still hasn’t turned around to look Mason in the eye, his gaze still fixed on the swirls of water and blood still pooled in the bottom of the sink. “But there’s no going back. There’s no undoing it. You _are_ the Beast now, Mason. You will be as long as you live.”

 _Now_ he turns around, and does it to find Mason watching him, expression raw and helpless. “I don’t want to be,” he tells Theo after a few long, stretched seconds, and it’s not a complaint, or a childish denial; it’s a confession, scared and honest.

Theo feels his heart—his _sister’s_ heart—twist in his chest. “I know. But you’ve got to stop treating the Beast like it’s something other than you. You keep trying to push that part of you away instead of embracing it, you’re never going to fully recover.”

 _Maybe worse_ , Theo thinks, his eyes flicking helplessly down to his wrists; the visible damage gone, but the phantom ache still present.

“You said you remember what it was like to be the Beast,” he says quietly, his gaze flicking up to Mason’s, “but that’s not fully accurate, is it?”

Mason’s brow furrows. “I don’t—”

Theo cuts him off, and not just for Mason’s sake; his nose is burning with Mason’s bitter scent and his ears are filled with Mason’s pounding heartbeat and the base of his skull is _throbbing_ with Mason’s twisted-up fear and self-loathing: “You remember what it was like when _Sebastian_ was the Beast.”

Mason stops, his eyes narrowing reflexively as he stares at Theo, and Theo can _feel_ his piqued interest, cautious and wary but _there_ and tucked up close to the top of Theo’s spine. Theo takes a deep breath.

“Strip away the mysticism from it, and what we all keep calling ‘the Beast’ is just a set of werewolf abilities. Strong werewolf abilities, but werewolf abilities nonetheless. The Beast is...a tool. Its abilities are _tools_ ,” Theo tries to explain.

He’s not fully succeeding; Mason is still watching him, close-mouthed and focused, but still hunched-in on himself and held tight with helpless, rigid tension. Theo takes another of those deep breaths, and tries again.

“The Beast’s abilities…Sebastian Valet used them to terrorize and murder people, but, Mason…”

He stops, and searches Mason’s unwavering gaze, trying to find a way to put words to the bone-deep _certainty_ he feels in his own mind, in his own gut; trying to find a way to give that certainty to Mason. And then he has it, and he smiles, small and flickering but _real_.

“Imagine what someone who—someone who is _truly good_ ,” Theo tells him, and sees the instant that Mason recognizes the quote: the Surgeon triumphant in their false victory, _true evil only comes by corrupting something truly good_ , “could do with them, instead.”

Mason stares at him, but Theo feels some of Mason’s despair go flowing down his own spine, Mason’s shock knocking it loose and possibility blooming slowly up to take its place. Theo doesn’t move, just lets Mason keep watching him, keep _searching_ his eyes, his face, his posture. He sees Mason’s still bloody fingers flex, and relax.

“You think it’s that simple?” Mason asks, and Theo doesn’t know how he’d _meant_ to sound—maybe sardonic, maybe dryly skeptical—but the _hope_ breaks through.

“I think it could be,” Theo tells him quietly, and means it.

Mason’s gaze drifts away from Theo’s. It drifts over Theo’s now-unmarked wrists, and the pool of Theo’s blood drying tacky on the floor. It drifts over the kitchen of the house that Corey had hidden him in to try and protect him from the possibility that it _wouldn’t_ be that simple, and the backpack filled with the vials of serum and other supernatural drugs that Theo had created to buy him time to find out whether or not it could.

Finally it drifts to his own hands, still bloody. He looks at them for a long stretch of seconds, turning them this way and that, and then he swallows, and clenches them, and walks forward until he can join Theo at the sink; Theo shifts to the side to give him room, and watches silently as Mason turns on the water, and scrubs at his fingers and palms until the blood is gone.

“Well,” he says finally, and looks once more at his hands, now dripping clear water; now clean. He flicks a look up at Theo. “I guess we’re going to find out.”

\---

Theo wakes up late.

From the quality of the sunlight angling in through his apartment’s massive windows, it’s past noon. Theo spends a few bleary, uncomprehending seconds staring out of them, and then he closes his eyes, and concentrates on the feel of the bracelet once more around his wrist. But no, the wards are down; Theo lets his eyes open back up, his brow furrowed, and then he rolls over and reaches for his phone.

And then he spends a few bleary, uncomprehending seconds staring at _it_.

 _Came by to lower the wards, but didn’t wake you up because you smelled exhausted. Does exhaustion have a scent?_ Scott’s text reads. _Anyway, Argent and Derek and the rest of us are doing more recon outside of BH, so take the day off. We’ll call if we need anything_.

Theo reads it twice, and then he puts his head back down, and keeps right on staring at it.

The Sheriff’s station parking lot looks practically empty without Argent’s hulking SUV and Scott’s Jeep and Derek’s Toyota inside it, and Theo parks in a spot nearer to the station than usual with a weird sense of cognitive dissonance. It probably _is_ the exhaustion; Theo’s thoughts feel sluggish, and slow, and his wrists—healed and whole as they may be, both from Mason’s claws nearly sawing through them last night _and_ from Theo rebreaking his left hand to get Argent’s bracelet back on it—ache. Letting his eyes slip shut and his head thunk back, Theo spends a few seconds in his truck just breathing, and then he gets out of the cab, and goes inside.

The Sheriff looks up at him as he enters his office. “Scott owes me twenty bucks,” he announces dryly. “I told him you wouldn’t stay in bed.”

“That was a pretty stupid bet for him to take,” Theo observes, but absently, because his attention is on Liam sitting spread-kneed on the Sheriff’s couch, a set of low-quality surveillance photos of some kind arrayed on the low table before him.

“He’s an optimist at heart,” the Sheriff replies, but Theo barely hears him; Liam waves, sending the photo currently in his hand flapping.

“One of the Sheriff’s sheriff buddies found something on Mason and Corey,” he explains, and without prompting or really any engagement from Theo at all, holds out the photo. “It’s not much, but…”

Theo clamps down on his instinctive panic, though it takes more effort than it should. He’s too goddamn _tired_ ; his fingers have a slight tremble to them when he reaches out to take the photo, and it’s better than even odds that both Liam and the Sheriff spot it. But the churn in his gut settles some when he gets a good look at Mason and Corey blurry through what looks like a toll camera lens, maybe: from the sickly pallor to Mason’s skin, visible even through the shit picture quality, and the too-thin slump to his shoulders in the passenger seat of the first car Corey had stolen, the picture had been taken at least a week and a half ago, maybe two. Theo reflexively checks the time stamp at the bottom and confirms his own suspicions; it’d been taken the night that Corey had relocated himself and Mason on Theo’s order.

“They’ve alive,” Liam says, so quietly that he might be saying it to Theo and he might be talking to himself. “They’ve alive and apparently _not_ locked up in some psychopath’s—” in Monroe’s “—basement, so there’s that.”

 _There’s that_ , Theo echoes silently; he could hear the bitterness, and the confusion, in Liam’s voice. He gives Liam a flicker of a sympathetic smile and hands the photo back.

“How’d your buddy find this?” Theo asks the Sheriff, and deliberately keeps his tone a curious sort of mild as he does, though there’s a razor-wire line of tension threatening to crank his spine tight; his phone in his pocket feels like it weighs approximately a million pounds.

“She was looking for a different fugitive, saw those photos, and remembered the picture I’d sent over of our two fugitives instead,” the Sheriff explains. “Unfortunately, that’s the extent of what we’ve got. Corey and Mason drop right back off the map after that one set of photos.”

Theo nods, that razor-wire line of tension transmuting instantly into a cool, helpless rush of relief. But it hardens right back up, some, when Liam reaches out to prod Theo gently in the knee.

“Hey,” he says, when Theo looks down at him. He holds up a different photo, this one obviously manipulated by one of the Sheriff’s friends to be a closer, cleaned-up shot of Mason’s face. “Does he look sick to you?”

Theo takes the photo. In it, Mason _does_ look sick; sick because he’d been _dying_ , though thank christ the picture quality is too low to really get that sense from it. Theo spends a few seconds staring down at it, one thumb stroking over the glossy surface, but really his attention on pulling apart Liam’s scent, separating it out into its individual threads. At the heart of all of them is _fear_ , and so Theo—he says the only thing he can.

“Corey would never let anything happen to him,” he assures Liam quietly, “and Mason’s stronger than he looks. Whatever’s going on, I’m sure he’s okay.”

Liam obviously doesn’t know whether to believe him, but clearly _wants_ to; he gives Theo a watery smile, and accepts the photo back when Theo offers it out. They both jump when the Sheriff gently clears his throat.

“My friend is going to keep digging, as are the sheriffs of the other counties that Mason and Corey could have landed in, based on the direction they were heading,” he assures Liam. “I promise, I’ll let you know the instant they find anything else.”

It’s a dismissal, but one kindly meant; the Sheriff wanting to get Liam away from the photos, with their complete lack of answers and landslide of additional questions, and out of his own head. And Liam clearly recognizes it as such; he swallows roughly and attempts a smile in the Sheriff’s direction, but his eyes flicker back down to the photos, and he doesn’t move.

“In the meantime,” the Sheriff continues, louder now and more brightly, as if Liam had whole-heartedly agreed, “please get this one—” he nods towards Theo, “—out of my station, and back somewhere where he can hopefully sleep for another day or two. I don’t need to be able to smell exhaustion to be able to _see_ it.”

This time Liam’s smile is full, and real, and it gets wider and more amused when he glances up at Theo and sees the resigned look on Theo’s face. He laughs, loud and helplessly, and then he starts gathering up the photos and stands with them in hand.

“Sure,” he tells the Sheriff as he hands over the photos, the Sheriff taking them with a too-gentle smile, and then he turns back around and prods Theo in the shoulder, towards the door. “C’mon.”

“Where’s your car?” Theo asks as they’re on their way out. He waves to a few of the deputies who wave to him as they go; he’d become something of a reluctant fixture around the station.

“At home, still. Battery died,” Liam says, shrugging, which at least answered the question of why Theo hadn’t realized Liam was at the station until he was halfway through it. “My mom dropped me off.”

Theo feels his brow furrow. “Why didn’t you just get her to jump your car?”

“Because after the Sheriff called, I didn’t want to _wait_ ,” Liam answers, a little reproachfully.

Theo winces. _God_ , he’s off his game; first sleeping through Scott’s apparent puttering around of his apartment, then Liam’s presence at the station, and now this: one of the stupidest questions he’s asked in recent memory. Liam looks sidelong at him for a moment, and then the hard line of his mouth softens some.

Grateful for Liam’s uncharacteristic bout of tactfulness in apparently being willing to let it go, Theo fishes his keys out of his pocket. “C’mon, then. I’ll drop you off.”

But Liam just swipes the keys from his hand, Theo reacting too slowly to stop him. He grins at Theo, cheeky, once he has them, twirling the ring of keys around his index finger. “Nah,” he says. “Let’s go back to your place.”

He doesn’t wait for Theo to agree, or even _not_ to agree, just starts heading for Theo’s truck. Theo stares after him, thrown, but Liam absolutely _would_ be the type to drive off in _Theo’s own car_ without him, and so after another stunned second he shakes himself and hurries to catch up with him. He also tries to take his keys back, but Liam dodges him.

“Based on the state of your _face_ , you’d drive us into a ditch,” Liam explains loftily, and then makes a noise and scuttles backward when Theo makes a lunge for his keys. Theo makes one more attempt, and then sense—and dignity—reassert themselves, and he gives up, and throws up his hands, and goes to climb into the passenger seat of his own vehicle.

Liam follows him inside, sliding into the driver’s seat with a grin. “That’s the spirit,” he tells Theo. “Teenage sulking.”

Theo punches him in the arm.

The second they get back to Theo’s place, Liam immediately makes a beeline for his kitchen. He isn’t going to find much of anything there, but Theo leaves him to find that out for himself, both as an admittedly petty revenge and because his phone starts vibrating insistently in his pocket. For a second he thinks it’s a call, but in reality it’s several text messages coming through one after the next; the seven digits of Corey’s unsaved number, and a growing column of text underneath them.

_M says you said we can lower dose_

_Is that actually a good idea?_

_He told me what happened last night_

Theo hadn’t, even though he probably should have. It’d just seemed like something that should be Mason’s to tell, or not tell. And apparently he had.

_Maybe we should wait_

_It just seems like a risk_

Theo stares down at the little stack of messages, his thumb flicking over the edge of his phone case, and then he nearly fumbles his phone altogether when Liam suddenly yells from the kitchen: “The state of your cabinets is embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for you.”

“Oh, no. However will I survive,” Theo calls back, deadpan, and taps into the message composition box of his and Corey’s text thread.

_No, no waiting. His body is clearly strong enough._

He hesitates, then adds:

_It’s his mind that needs the training, now._

It takes a few seconds, and then the little dot-dot-dot of Corey typing pops up.

 _Fine_ , his next message reads, and then is almost immediately followed by an alternating series of emojis of a brain and a weightlifter. Theo snorts out a laugh.

“Who’s that?” Liam asks curiously, popping back through the negative space between two walls that forms the kitchen’s doorway.

“Wrong number,” Theo answers, and tucks his phone away. His eyebrows shoot up when he sees the protein bar Liam has half-shoved into his mouth, the opened wrapper still hanging off the end.

“Shut up,” Liam orders, though it comes more like _shump umph_. He chews, and swallows, and removes the rest of the bar to inform Theo, “I ordered a pizza.”

“Good for you,” Theo replies dryly; Liam rolls his eyes.

He also drags Theo upstairs to the loft, bare except for the air mattress Theo had been using as a bed. He makes a face at it, but he also scoops up Theo’s laptop sitting next to it and drops down onto it without further comment. Theo watches him curiously as he unfolds the laptop and starts taking half-hearted and clearly ridiculous guesses at Theo’s password; he can clearly see Liam type _asshole_ and _best chimera ever_.

“What are you doing, exactly?” Theo wonders, still stood near the top of the stairs.

“I was in the middle of watching something when the Sheriff called,” Liam answers dismissively, and tries _werecoyote1!_. “C’mon,” he orders, and picks up Theo’s laptop by the edge to wave it in his direction. “Unlock this bad boy so I can get to Netflix.”

Theo takes it primarily out of concern that Liam’s less-than-gentle handling is going to do it some damage, and less out of any desire to actually obey Liam’s command. Still, he taps in his password and hands it back; it seems the easiest of his possible options, since Liam seemed determined to colonize his apartment with or without Theo’s direct participation.

What he _isn’t_ expecting is Liam to immediately lie back and make himself comfortable on one-half of the air mattress once he’s actually logged into Netflix. He stares. “What are you doing?”

“What, you think we’re both going to fit on that pathetic hand-me-down couch of yours?” Liam asks, like _Theo_ is the one being ridiculous. “And even if we could,” he continues, without breaking stride or giving an opportunity for Theo to respond, “you don’t have anywhere to set this but the floor, and that’s not going to work.”

He gives Theo a winning smile, and folds one of Theo’s pillows in half behind his head.

Theo should argue. Or at least he should _want_ to argue, but back in his apartment and so close to his bed again, he can’t find the energy. And so after another half-beat of hesitation, he looks ceiling-ward and makes a face, and then circles around until he can climb onto the other side of the mattress, stretched out and with his head on the remaining pillow.

“What are we watching?” He mumbles, and lets his heavy eyelids slip closed partway through Liam’s explanation.

He wakes up a few hours later with his forehead all but pressed to Liam’s hip, and half-curled around the point of one Liam’s knees, Liam sitting with his legs crossed. He doesn’t seem to realize that Theo’s awake, at first, his attention on Theo’s laptop in his lap as he scrolls through a text-heavy screen and then switches windows to type something into what looks like an outline.

“Boring show, too artsy-performative,” Theo mumbles, his voice sleep-roughened and rasping. “One star.”

Liam doesn’t even bother to look at him, but Theo can see a corner of his lips quirk. “Shut up. Ass.”

Theo shifts around a bit, raising and lowering his head to work out a slight kink in his neck. He doesn’t, however, shift away from the warmth of Liam’s hip and leg; Liam doesn’t shift away from him, either. “What are you doing?” Theo asks after a few more seconds, genuinely curious.

“Homework,” Liam answers absently, though not unkindly; clearly distracted. “I’ve got a paper due in a few weeks on the Roman expansion for European History.”

“Mykonos,” Theo remembers; Liam glances down at him, and smiles.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Mykonos.”

He works for a few more minutes, clearly in some kind of groove, and then he sighs and straightens up and rolls his shoulders and neck before slumping back down, and clicking a few more times around his opened browser windows; signing himself out of his email and cloud accounts, looks like. He shuts the laptop once he’s done.

“I should probably get going, though,” he says quietly, a little reluctantly. “It’s almost that time.” He jerks his chin towards the windows, and the twilight clearly falling. “Argent or whoever will be here soon.”

“Hmm,” Theo hums; he’d fallen halfway back asleep while Liam had continued to work, and doesn’t fully register Liam’s statement until a few seconds after. He blinks himself awake when he does, and rises up a little on one elbow. “Okay,” he agrees, his voice still burring with sleep.

It takes him a few beats to realize that Liam is searching his face; Theo squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head a bit to try and wake himself up further, and when he opens them back up he squints at Liam. “What?”

Liam just gives him a strange, thoughtful grimace. “They’re that bad, huh?” He observes quietly. He must see the confusion on Theo’s face, because he clarifies, “The nightmares.”

Theo echoes his grimace, and shifts so that he can flop back flat; the new position means that he can stare up at the ceiling rather than at Liam’s open, quietly curious—and quietly concerned—face. The artistically roughened wood of the exposed beams doesn’t offer up any insight into how to respond, so after a second Theo just blows out a slow, rough exhale and says the only thing that he can think of.

“I’ve got a lot to make up for,” he murmurs, which is a deflection and a confession both, even if Liam probably won’t—can’t—recognize it as either.

But apparently he takes Theo’s reply at face value, and blows out his own long breath. “Yeah, well,” he says after a second, and after Theo turns his head slightly to meet his eyes as Liam looks down at him. “Just don’t kill yourself trying,” he orders, and with something twisting itself into the corners of the tight line of his mouth. “You won’t be able to make anything up to anyone if you turn yourself into a corpse in the attempt.”

Theo stares at him; feels his mouth dropping slightly open as he does. Liam flushes some, but doesn’t take it back, just looks away for a few seconds and then shrugs, roughly, and swings his legs over the side of the mattress so he can stand.

“The rest of the pizza is in the fridge,” he says, too brightly and too nonchalantly to be a natural follow-on to his previous statement, and then he gives Theo a flicker of a smile and starts heading for the stairs.

Theo scrambles reflexively up onto his elbows. “Wait, you don’t—”

 _Have your car_ , he’s thinking, but Liam waves a dismissive hand over his shoulder. “Already called my dad, he’s swinging by to grab me on the way home from the hospital.”

Then he stops, and half-turns to look back at Theo. He doesn’t speak right away, just taps an idle, awkward knuckle against the loft railing. Finally he flattens out his tapping hand, shoulders rolling back and spine straightening.

“Seriously, Theo,” he says. “No corpses.” He grins at his own ridiculous warning, and then adds, “Night,” before immediately turning to jog down the stairs, and without waiting for Theo to reply.

“Night, Liam, I guess,” Theo says, but by the time he recovers from his shock enough to say it, he’s talking to himself; he grimaces, and lets himself flop back flat.

He spends half a minute like that, just breathing—breathing in the scent of _Liam_ , if he’s being honest with himself—and then he slaps out a hand, and retrieves his phone, and sets an alarm for a few hours from the time glowing steadily from the corner of his screen.

“No corpses,” he mumbles to himself, half an unthinking, helpless promise, as he lets his phone drop onto the mattress, his eyes slipping closed.

\---

It’s a promise he nearly breaks not even six hours later.

“Mason?” Theo calls as he shuts the vacation home’s side door behind himself.

There’s a bite of ozone in the air, staticky and harsh, which means that Mason’s practicing his transformations again. Theo rereads Corey’s text about running out for groceries one last time as he absently calculates Corey’s likely ETA, and then he tucks his phone back in his pocket as he goes to follow the steady thread of Mason’s heartbeat to the man himself.

He’s in the living room. Even inside the spacious stretch of it, the bite of ozone becomes a stink, heavy and cloying and setting an alarm to ringing inside of Theo’s head; he slows on his approach, his brow furrowing.

“Mason?” He calls again, more quietly this time.

The slope of Mason’s back doesn’t straighten, or turn. He stays hunched over, sat on the couch with his back to Theo, and in the pin-drop silence Theo can hear the wet _snick_ as Mason extends and retracts his claws one at a time, over and over again. Mason had left the lights off when he came in—or he’d sat down and started doing whatever he’s doing before it got dark, and didn’t bother to get up and turn them on—and in the relative darkness of the weak moonlight filtering in through the windows, there’s an added dull, eerie glow; his eyes, shifted but not blazing. Theo has to fight back a reflexive flinch and—ignoring his suddenly-phantom-aching wrists—starts to circle around the couch.

“Ma—” he starts, but Mason cuts him off.

“Did you know grief has a scent?” He asks, and Theo finds himself thinking _too calm_ without any context; adrenaline flares in his chest and starts seeping instantly and insidiously out through his limbs. It distracts him from thinking of a response, but Mason apparently doesn’t need or hadn’t actually expected one; he speaks again.

“Of course you do,” he corrects himself, something slick and dangerous to the easy slide to his voice, “what was I thinking? You seem to know everything about being a shapeshifter.”

Theo stops, halfway around the couch. He stops because Mason finally looks over at him, and Theo’s breath catches in his throat.

“Good or bad sign?” Mason wonders mirthfully as he takes in Theo’s shock, but there’s something slouching and shifting underneath his seemingly-innocuous tone, and Theo nearly takes a step back before he catches himself.

Mason’s eyes— _his_ eyes, the ghostly pale of the Beast’s signature shift confined to his irises, now, instead of filling them corner to corner—narrow some as Mason smiles, but Theo’s not stupid enough to mistake either for the easy amusement Mason’s tone and words suggest; he swallows, and has to lock his knees to keep one of his feet from sliding back into a staggered defensive stance.

Mason catches it. Theo _knows_ that Mason catches it, even though he couldn’t say how. Mason smiles wider.

“What’s it smell like to you?” Mason wonders, and reminds Theo when Theo just keeps staring silently—warily—at him, “Grief.”

He climbs to his feet finally as he says it, and no matter how hard Theo tries to keep himself from doing it, he steps back. “Mason, what—” he starts, low and quiet and urgent, but Mason just shakes his head lightly, and Theo’s teeth snap together without his full conscious say-so.

“Does Liam’s smell different than Scott’s, maybe?” Mason presses, verbally and physically; he takes another step towards Theo, who takes another step backwards. “You know,” he adds, clarifying, “when Liam thinks of you manipulating him into trying to kill Scott—” Theo flinches _hard_ , “—or when Scott thinks of all of the people he couldn’t save from the Doctors and the Beast. People like _Monroe_ ,” he says, low and dangerous and with a rising burr to his voice that seems to reverberate through Theo’s very _bones_ , “who turned around and used their grief as a weapon, as an _excuse_ , to create more of it.”

“Mason,” Theo tries, but he’s running out of _room_ ; he’s got about three more steps back before he’s going to run straight into the plate glass windows looking out over the house’s expansive backyard.

But Mason doesn’t pause. “I didn’t know grief had a scent,” he continues relentlessly, and forces Theo another step back. Then his lips flicker in a quick, humorless smirk as he says, “Not until you started training me, at least,” in a tone like he was trying to share the joke. Theo realizes that he’d put his hands up between them at some point when Mason’s eyes flick down to them.

When they flick down to his _wrists_.

“And I _really_ didn’t know that grief can smell different on the same person, depending on what they’re thinking about,” he murmurs softly, picking back up on the thread of their conversation. On _his_ conversation, _his_ point, whatever that was going to end up being; Theo swallows, helplessly, all but trapped between Mason and the window and knowing— _knowing_ , somehow, deep in his gut, in his hindbrain—that if he tried to run, it’d be worse.

Knowing that he isn’t the predator in the room.

His back hits the cool glass of the window, and his eyes fly to Mason’s, Mason coming to a stop just a few scant, dangerous feet in front of him. Mason’s lips twist, and it’s a smile, but it isn’t; Mason’s upper lip lifts, and Theo finds himself staring helplessly at the dull shine of his fangs behind them.

“Do you know,” Mason asks, soft and silky and with _threat_ saturating every syllable, “what Corey smells like when he thinks about Josh and Tracy?”

Theo freezes, and stares, his throat closing up below his wide, wide eyes.

“Because I do, now,” Mason tells him, and then he strikes out.

Theo barely manages to dodge it. He barely registers the sharp, near-deafening screech as Mason’s claws score five deep lines across the plate glass of the window, focused as he is on scrambling out from underneath Mason’s arm and to the side. “Mason!” He yells, trying to snap him out of it, but Mason just snarls at him and strikes out again, and this time Theo doesn’t have the time or room to dodge back out of reach; he throws up an arm to prevent Mason’s claws from splitting his face open, and cries out when he feels his forearm snap under the force.

He hits his knees, his broken arm cradled to his chest, but he doesn’t have time to focus on it; above him, he can see Mason’s arm reeling back for another attack, and so Theo rolls backwards onto his side and kicks out, catching Mason in the back of the calf and sending him stumbling forward onto his knees and clawed hands.

Theo doesn’t waste time; the second Mason hits the ground he scrambles to his feet, and _runs_. His broken arm throws off his gait and slows him down, and Theo curses as he hears Mason snarl behind him and surge to his feet, his claws scratching at the wood beneath him as he launches himself forward.

He isn’t going to be able to reach the door, Theo realizes. He isn’t going to be able to reach it, and even if he _could_ , he—wouldn’t. _Mason would follow me_ , he just keeps thinking, even as the desperation clawing at his throat urges him to do it _anyway_ ; Mason would follow him, and someone would see him, and then everyone—Argent, and the Sheriff, and Scott, and Liam—would know.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Theo snarls, and uses his good arm to whip himself around a corner and down a hallway leading towards the kitchen.

“This is your _fault_ , Theo!” Mason yells behind him; Theo can hear him slam into the hallway wall, too much momentum or just too uncaring to worry about slowing down. “Josh and Tracy, the other chimeras, Liam—” _me_ , he doesn’t say, but Theo hears anyway, “—without you, how much of what the Dread Doctors did would have been possible? How many people would still be _alive?_ ”

Theo stumbles, Mason’s accusation burning at him, but he knows better than to stop; he throws himself into the kitchen and rounds the massive granite island, his broken arm—still sluggishly healing—cradled to his chest as he whirls back around to face Mason as Mason comes rushing through the doorway after him. He staggers to an unsteady stop, his eyes—his irises still glowing ghostly blue, but with the color starting to bleed out past them—flicking down to the granite of the island between them. His lips flicker with a vicious kind of amusement.

“Mason, please,” Theo pleads, his uninjured arm held out, but internally he’s cursing himself, because he’s realizing he’d done this to himself.

 _You are the Beast, now,_ he’d told Mason. _You have to stop treating the Beast like it’s something other than you_ , he’d ordered him, and Mason clearly _had_. But for all Theo’s glib, _idiotically_ confident assurances otherwise, it was never going to be as simple as someone _truly good_ managing to take everything the Beast _was_ —everything that Sebastian Valet made it—and melding it into something new.

The past was never going to be that easily left behind.

“ _Please_ ,” Theo repeats desperately, because he can see Mason calculating the best way to remove the island as an obstacle; the best way to get at Theo.

Mason’s eyes flick up to his, and Theo feels his breath catch and his spine go rigid as they stare at each other for a few slow, dragging seconds. And then:

“No,” Mason says, and _moves_.

It’s a fight, and one that Theo realizes almost instantly that he’s going to _lose_. Mason—his muscles and blood and body fueled by the Beast’s abilities—is just too damn strong, and too damn fast, and Theo is just—too damn unwilling to hurt him. He could play dirty, he knows he could—he has to keep yanking back his instincts to drop, to strike out with his own clawed hands for the back of Mason’s knees, and the tendons and ligaments running up the back of his legs, or the arteries shielded under only the thin layers of skin of Mason’s inner thighs, the inside of his biceps—but he can’t bring himself to do it; Mason’s body still recovering, Mason’s body still adapting, and Theo…

Theo too unwilling to risk killing him.

Mason strikes out at him again, and Theo just barely manages to tangle up his arms with his own. “Mason,” he begs, wedging himself in close so that Mason’s clawed hands are trapped between their bodies, “ _please_. I know what I did. I know I’m never going to make up for it,” he hurries to say, and over the sound of Mason snarling and snapping his fanged mouth just inches from Theo’s throat, Theo jerking back out of reach while keeping Mason’s arms trapped, “but _please_.”

And for a moment Mason does stop struggling. He meets Theo’s eyes, his own now filled corner to corner with pale blue light, and he holds his body still as he holds Theo’s gaze.

And then his mouth twists in snarl, and he tells Theo lowly, “Argent should have put you back in the ground,” as he suddenly heaves up and away from Theo, ripping his arms away from Theo’s grip and shoving him back a few staggering steps. Theo isn’t prepared for it, and he’s still trying to recover his balance when—

When Mason strikes out, and catches him right across his unprotected throat.

\---

Theo wakes up already scrabbling at his neck.

“Hey!” Someone shouts. “Hey, hey, hey! You’re okay, you’re okay!”

Hands on his hands, pulling his own away from—from the smooth skin of his unbroken throat. The shock of it snaps Theo out of the last of his panicked haze and he falls back flat onto—onto the _air mattress_ in his _apartment_. He looks around a little wildly, disbelieving, but it’s true: he’s back in his apartment, somehow, the bare walls and the bare stretch of floor of the upstairs loft and the bare expanse of the massive windows letting in the weak winter sunlight.

“You’re okay,” that same someone repeats, more quietly—clearly relieved by Theo’s sudden calm—and Theo jerks to look up at Liam, staring.

 _No, I’m not_ , Theo thinks helplessly. _I was dead_. Except. _Except:_

Corey, yelling Mason’s name and throwing himself onto Mason’s upraised arm—clawed and poised for the deathblow—to drag it back, and away from Theo lying helpless and choking on the vacation home’s kitchen floor.

Mason, coming back to himself in a haze of confusion that had transitioned almost instantly into _horror_ , his hands—no longer clawed, but still bloody—coming up to cover his mouth as he’d stared down at Theo; at the ruin he’d made of Theo’s throat.

Corey, shoving away from Mason to scramble onto his knees by Theo’s side, his hands hovering uncertainly over Theo’s chest as he’d repeated _oh god, oh god_ , on a frantic loop before he’d finally given up and pressed his palms down _hard_ on the jagged claw marks over Theo’s neck, like the squeezed-together bands of his fingers could keep the blood from spilling out between them.

Theo clenches his eyes shut and sits up in one rough movement, his legs swinging around so that he can plant them on the floor and then his elbows on top of them. He digs the heels of his palms into his eyes, ignoring Liam’s startled sound and his hands falling away, and forces himself to _think_ , to _remember:_

Mason, still standing frozen a few feet away, alternately moaning _what did I do, what did I do_ , and begging Corey to tell him _what do we do?_

Corey, his fingers shaking where they still pressed against the ruined mess of Theo’s throat, shouting back _I don’t know, I don’t—_ , until suddenly apparently he _did_ know, and he’d gasped out _Josh, Josh at Eichen, after I was hurt fighting Parrish_ , and he’d scrabbled backwards—giving up on his useless attempt to stem the bleeding—and had grabbed Mason to drag him over to Theo, and had pressed Mason’s hands to the bare skin of Theo’s arm.

Mason, frantic, protesting _but I don’t know_ how _,_ and Corey yelling—his voice hoarse, and breaking—to shut up and _try_ , and Mason had.

“Theo?” Liam ventures tentatively, and touches his fingers lightly to Theo’s shoulder.

Theo jumps, broken out of the memory. Or out of _that_ memory at least, but that didn’t answer: “What are you doing here?” Theo asks, confusion and residual fear and a delayed, useless sort of adrenaline turning the question into a harsh demand.

Liam eyes him strangely. “You asked me to come over,” he replies slowly, his eyes narrowing as he studies Theo. “You texted me,” he prompts, apparently seeing the complete lack of recollection on Theo’s face. After a moment he seemingly decides he needs hard evidence and he twists around to pull his phone out of his pocket, unlocking it and handing it over to Theo as he continues, “You texted and asked if I’d come over after the wards came down.”

 _No, I didn’t_ , Theo thinks, even as he stares down at the clear evidence that he _had_ , apparently. But:

Corey, falling back onto his heels after Mason’s siphoning of Theo’s pain had allowed Theo’s body to heal enough to keep him from immediately dying, at least, Corey gasping for air and burying his face in his bloody hands. And then, his voice exhausted and muffled but steel-lined for all of that: _we have to get him back to Beacon Hills before morning_.

Mason, cradling Theo’s head in his lap in the backseat of Theo’s truck as Corey had driven them onwards, whispering _I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,_ over and over again as he kept draining the seemingly never-ending well of Theo’s pain, the claw marks slow to heal because _the Beast was—is—essentially an alpha in its own right._

Corey, overriding Mason’s protests about the barrier locking Theo’s apartment tight to remind him _it doesn’t_ work _on chimeras, remember? Like mountain ash. That’s why the bracelet—_ , as they’d dragged Theo through the doorway between them.

And then, finally:

Mason and Corey both, frantic and torn and _terrified_ , needing to go but not wanting to leave, until Mason had sucked in a sharp breath, and said _let me, let me try something_ , and he’d knelt down and cradled Theo’s delirious head between his palms as he’d ordered, his eyes flashing ghostly blue and not red but it hadn’t _mattered_ , not between the Beast’s natural abilities and you-and-I-and-Mason-share-an-ancestor: you have to change clothes; you have to shower; you have to put the bracelet back on.

You have to text Liam and ask him to come over.

And Theo had done as Mason had ordered, apparently; he looks down at his clean clothes and his clean skin and the bracelet wrapped snugly around his left wrist. He looks up, and looks at Liam, who he’d asked to come over and who had, in fact—apparently—come over.

But, Theo realizes, frowning, _not_ after the wards came down.

“How did you…?” He wonders, the harshness gone from his voice as he looks away from Liam out towards the front door one floor below, where he could still feel the barrier locked firmly in place. “The wards are still up.”

Liam shrugs, but he also jerks his gaze away from Theo’s, a brush of color appearing across his cheeks. “I woke Derek up, and made him let me in.” He sucks in a deep breath and adds, louder and preemptively defensive: “Your text was weird, okay, I didn’t know…” He stops, and swallows, and doesn’t continue.

Theo drags his gaze away from the direction of the front door, and back towards Liam. He can’t catch Liam’s eye, though, and instead finds himself staring at the side of Liam’s face. “Sorry,” Theo eventually says, and isn’t—entirely sure what he’s apologizing for.

 _That_ gets him a flicker of a look, before Liam jerks his eyes away again almost immediately. But after a second Liam just blows out a frustrated breath and scrubs his palms roughly over his thighs, and finally twists around—still perched on the edge of the mattress where he’d thrown himself to get at Theo’s frantic, scratching fingers, earlier—to look at Theo head-on. Theo finds himself straightening up, some, under the attention.

“How about instead of an apology,” Liam starts, steel-lined and a little dangerously, “you give me an explanation.”

“I—” Theo starts, even that single word still stuttering its way out of him, but he doesn’t get a chance to finish—fortuitously, maybe, considering he had no idea _how_ to finish—because he gets a sudden cool wash of feeling, and his front door rolls open.

“Theo? Liam?” Derek calls, and steps inside; Theo can hear the creak of the floorboards.

Theo seizes on the distraction, even as he sees Liam’s mouth tighten mutinously. “Up here.” He holds Liam’s eyes as he does it, Liam glaring right back.

They both glance over when Derek crests the stairwell. Derek meets their eyes, and then raises an eyebrow. “Morning,” he says, more than a little laconically.

The tone’s meant for Liam; for the steady, flint-and-tinder bite of his scent about to burst into angry flame. Liam’s eyes start to bleed gold, his upper lip curling in a snarl; Theo reaches forward, quick and without warning, to snag Liam’s hand resting on the air mattress and drag it up, and away, before the threat of his claws could puncture it.

It jolts Liam out of it, some, at least, his head—with his still-golden eyes—jerking around to stare at Theo, blinking. Theo stares right back for a few seconds, and then he forces himself to swallow, and release Liam’s wrist.

“Something’s up,” he interprets, and drags his attention away from Liam and to Derek, “isn’t it?”

He isn’t fully prepared for the way Derek’s scent goes hot, and sharply satisfied, his eyes briefly shining above the predator’s curl of his mouth. “We found Monroe.”

If he’d expected that to instantly settle matters, he gets the opposite: Liam goes rigid and starts to immediately interrogate him, and then nearly as immediately breaks off of that to start yelling at Theo the second Theo pushes himself to his feet.

“This is _bullshit_ ,” Liam is still snarling ten minutes later, and efficiently; the vitriolic protest perfectly split between Derek leaning disinterestedly against the loft’s upper railing and Theo emerging from the bathroom to pull on a change of clothes. “You’re in no shape to go _anywhere—_ ” this directed at Theo, “—and you and Argent and the Sheriff are a bunch of _drama queens_ , you haven’t found _shit_.”

Derek receives Liam’s accusation without the slightest change of expression; if anything, he looks a little amused. “The building we found is definitely her headquarters.”

“Yeah, but you haven’t seen _her_ there,” Liam shoots back, “so why the goddamn fire drill?”

Derek shrugs, but when he responds he’s looking at Theo, not at Liam. “I don’t know,” he answers easily. “Why the midnight cry for help?”

Theo stiffens. Luckily—for some value of luck, anyway—he doesn’t need to think of a response, because Liam snaps, “Oh, fuck _you_.”

Derek holds Theo’s eyes for a few seconds longer, but his actual interest in the matter is apparently minimal; he smirks slightly, and lets it go. “Regardless,” he says, a certain amount of hardness creeping into his tone, “we need to get going. Though—” he adds, and this time he _does_ glare openly at Theo, “—you burn as much incense as you did last night again, and you and I are going to have to have a talk about your coping mechanisms, landlord to tenant. The whole _building_ reeked.”

Theo just barely manages to wrestle control of his expression before his confusion, and then his surprise, can show on his face. _Mason and Corey_ , he realizes, and feels a knot of tension sitting hard up under his ribs that he hadn’t even noticed—too much else going on, too many unanswered questions to navigate around and too many lies, silent and otherwise, to protect—come undone; they’d covered up their scents. Inelegantly, maybe, but.

“So keep my security deposit as damages,” Theo forces himself to say, a perfect blend of falsely bright and sardonic. “Oh wait!”

Derek rolls his eyes, but he also starts heading down the stairs. Theo makes to follow him, and is dragged almost immediately to a stop by Liam. “Theo!” He hisses, gold once more chipping at his irises.

Theo feels his heart—his _sister’s_ heart—twist in his chest. “I’m fine, Liam,” he tries to assure him, and goes to push Liam’s hand off his arm with his own. But Liam just tightens his grip, and Theo doesn’t take his fingers away, just leaves them layered on top of Liam’s own. “It was just—a bad night,” Theo murmurs, which is a shitty explanation but one of the only ones he has to hand.

Liam searches his face. His fingers are tight enough around Theo’s bicep that he’s going to have bruises that will—hopefully, though not _definitely_ , Theo’s body drained of its resources—heal when he takes them away, but he doesn’t seem to realize it; his jaw is working, and his scent wavering. Finally both steady; his jaw clenches, and his scent goes stony.

“I’m coming with you,” he says, and loudly enough that Derek—already down the stairs, and waiting impatiently by the front door—can hear him, too.

“Fine,” Derek calls back, irritated. “Whatever.”

“Liam…” Theo murmurs, but Liam just jerks his hand out from underneath Theo’s own and starts jogging away from him, and down the stairs; leaving Theo standing alone in his loft. He exhales out a rough, frustrated breath.

And then, partway through the drive to the station, he deliberately gets himself caught up in a tangled mess of early-morning commuter traffic.

He watches the fading tail lights of Derek’s Toyota and Liam’s SUV disappear into the distance—they’d both sensibly changed lanes and then less sensibly nearly ran a red light to avoid the snarled block of cars that Theo is now caught in—and then he fumbles out his phone.

It doesn’t even manage a full ring.

“Theo? Theo, oh, thank god,” Corey half-shouts, Theo reflexively jerking the phone away from his ear and then giving up with a muted growl and putting the damn thing on speaker. Corey’s still talking even as Theo is tossing the phone onto the seat next to himself. “Oh, thank god. You’re alive.” Then, more distantly: “He’s ali—”

Theo cuts him off, ignoring both the overwhelming _relief_ in Corey’s voice and the way that it sets Theo’s own chest to twisting. “What the hell were you two thinking?” He snarls, and—distracted by the rising tide of his own anger—nearly rear-ends the humped-back hybrid in front of him.

He’s slamming on his brakes even as Corey is stammering out, “What?”

And Theo can’t help it: the tangled mass of—of _everything_ in his chest—fear and anger and the way his fingers won’t stop trembling around his steering wheel—cracks open as he shouts, “You could have been _caught!_ ”

His voice breaks as he yells it; Theo forces himself to swallow, and ignore it, his attention forcibly split between the traffic around him and the stunned silence on the line. A stunned silence that doesn’t last.

“We could have been…?” Corey repeats incredulously, and clearly enough that he’s not on speaker like Theo may have expected; Theo finds himself wondering—adrenaline bolting helplessly up his spine—where Mason is. Then Corey seems to gather himself enough to yell back, “You _would have been_ caught if we hadn’t gotten you back to Beacon Hills in time!”

“That _wasn’t your problem_ ,” Theo snarls back, lower this time, half-distracted by the city maintenance van that’s trying to edge into his lane as Theo tries to edge out of it.

“That wasn’t…that _wasn’t_ …” Corey repeats, just as incredulously. “Are you _kidding me?_ ”

“You should have told me… _Mason_ should have ordered me,” Theo says, his voice breaking on Mason’s name, “to get myself back. You didn’t need to come yourselves. That was an unbelieveably _stupid_ risk.”

“You would have driven yourself into a ditch and _died anyway!_ ” Corey counters, and underneath the rising anger in his voice is _confusion_ , and _fear_ ; he clearly has no idea why Theo is fighting him—fighting _them_ —so hard on this.

“Great!” Theo shouts back, more than a little hysterically; free of the traffic jam, finally, he puts his foot down hard enough on the gas to send himself back against his seat. “And if I had, _you_ wouldn’t have risked coming back to Beacon Hills and getting caught, and _I_ wouldn’t have risked leading Argent and the others to you!”

There’s another bout of stunned silence on the line, and then Corey—and then Corey _and_ Mason, Theo can hear the latter in the background—breathe out, “Theo…”

“You shouldn’t have risked it,” Theo repeats, but hoarsely, like the flash-fire of his anger had come and gone and burned up his vocal cords with it; had left behind only the terror that Theo can feel eating away at his gut; at the deceptively-smooth skin of his throat. “You shouldn’t have... And making me text _Liam_ , jesus. Argent and Derek and everybody are already suspicious _enough_ with how exhausted I am all the time, this is just going to—”

He’s pulling into the Sheriff’s station. He cuts himself off. “I’m at the station, I have to go. Just—try not to do anything equally stupid for the next twelve hours, okay? Let me figure out how badly you two screwed yourselves.”

He throws out a hand and hangs up, though not before he can hear a frantic burst of scrabbling and then Mason clearly saying, Corey’s voice gone silent: “Wait, Theo, please—!”

They don’t call back; they know better than to try. But Theo still spends a half-minute or so in the silence of his truck cab just breathing, folded over the steering wheel and with the tips of his fingers pressed to the ridges and bumps of his voice box, his throat, fumbling over the skin like if he just tried hard enough, _looked_ hard enough, he’d be able to find evidence of the jagged claw marks that had nearly killed him.

But there’s an internal clock counting down in his head— _always_ counting down in his head—and he’s already pushing his luck. Forcing himself back upright, Theo closes his eyes and takes several deep, slow breaths—in for seven, out for seven—until his heartbeat calms; until his fingers stop shaking. He gets out of his truck.

He slips through a few rows of random squad cars and civilian vehicles and nearly runs straight into Liam, who’d been hovering by his own locked SUV with his hands in his pockets and his head down as he’d scraped the toe of his shoe across the asphalt of the parking lot. He looks up jerkily when Theo appears, and takes a seemingly reflexive half-step forward as his eyes snap to and then start searching Theo’s face.

“Hi,” he says, a little blankly, then: “Sorry.”

Theo doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for, but. “It’s fine,” he says back, just as blankly. They stare at each other for a second longer, and then Liam rolls his shoulders roughly and jerks his head away, and starts making his way towards the station’s doors. Theo follows, after another second.

And then they both stop at the edge of the sidewalk, because Argent is stood just outside the entrance, arms crossed.

A few seconds of loaded silence crawl by, and then Liam swallows and tries, “Argent, I—” but Argent just cuts him off.

“You wanted to be here and be a part of this,” he says, his tone perfectly flat, and perfectly smooth, “then go be here, and be a part of it.” He jerks his chin towards the doors in a clear order.

Liam darts a look at Theo stood frozen next to him, and then he swallows again, and gives a jerky little nod, and goes. Theo stays exactly where he is, the still-tangled mess in his chest curdling into something else as Argent keeps his attention on Theo, even as Liam passes him on his way into the station.

Argent waits until the door clicks shut behind him, and then he says, “What happened last night?”

There’s nothing in his tone to give away what he’s thinking, but Theo doesn’t actually need there to be; he can take an extremely well-educated guess. He swallows, and forces out, “I had a bad night. I wasn’t—I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

He wasn’t thinking at _all_ , really; he’d been half-dead, and helplessly following someone else’s orders. But:

“A bad night,” Argent repeats levelly, clearly unsatisfied.

And Theo knows what he has to do, even though he desperately, _desperately_ doesn’t want to do it. But he’d known—he’d _always_ known—that he was going to need the card he has to play, just like he’d known he’d need to get into the operating theater one day, and so he takes a deep breath, and forces all the disdain, and the bitterness, and the anger slouching restlessly around his chest into his voice, and says:

“Yeah, a _bad night_ ,” more than a little viciously; viciously mad that he has to give this up, no matter that he’d been trying to prepare himself for it for _months_. “They _happen_ sometimes, after you’ve spent months in a supernatural prison getting your heart—” _not my heart_ , something in Theo’s mind, between his ribs, protests, “—ripped out of your chest by your dead sister, over and over again.”

It works. Theo knows _instantly_ that it works; he can see Argent’s expression flicker with surprise, even with the way he wrestles back control of it the next second. Still, Theo jerks his eyes away from Argent’s face, his shoulders heaving with his harsh, uneven breaths, no matter his attempts to stifle both; no matter that they aren’t, actually, part of any act that he’s trying to put on.

“Hmm,” Argent hums; Theo feels his jaw clench, and his fingers reflexively twitch. He forces himself to look back up at Argent, who watches him levelly back before his lips suddenly twitch just the slightest bit upwards. “You think it was more than you deserved?”

Theo stares at him. “Is there a right answer to that question?” He snaps back, and Argent raises a single, inquisitive eyebrow. Theo scoffs. “I say yes, I’m all but admitting that I don’t give a shit about—about—” He can’t say their names—any of their names—so he just gives up, and keeps going instead, “but if I say no, I’m just trying to tell you what I think you want to hear, kiss your ass.”

Argent does smirk, then. Theo doesn’t know why it feels like some kind of victory; why it soothes some of the ragged edges of the snarled mess scratching at the inside of his ribs. The shock of it is enough to knock him out of his own spiraling thoughts, some, anyway; he stares at Argent, who stares silently back.

“Look,” Theo finally says, quiet and more than a little defeated. “It was a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

He doesn’t know if he’s lying as he says it. He’s not really even sure which part he might be technically lying _about_. And ordinarily he’d do everything he could to keep all of that off his face, but now he lets it all bubble up out of his chest and into the tight furrow of his brows, the twisted grimace to his mouth; his thoughts and emotions and the clanging, cracked-open fear—for Mason and Corey, _of_ Mason and Corey, of Argent and for Liam and all the rest of it—made into just another tool. Just another card to play. He lets his eyes close, and then gives into the urge to bring his hands up to scrub roughly over his face.

When he drops them, Argent is still watching him. But all he says when Theo meets his eyes again is, “Monroe doesn’t know that we’ve located her headquarters. We’ve got an opportunity, here.”

Theo stares at him, disbelieving. The smirk on Argent’s face had melted away but it reappears for just a second; just a quick quirk.

“C’mon,” he orders, and angles his body back towards the doors.

Theo—after another few seconds of hesitation—Theo goes.

\---

He spends the rest of the day at the station, bent over the map and compass and occasionally joining in the raging debate going on in the Sheriff’s office about Monroe, her people, and the best way to ensure the capture and takedown of both.

Liam, however, does not: less than a half-hour into first period at Beacon Hills High, Lydia’s mom calls the Sheriff’s desk phone and—in classic Martin family fashion—proceeds to systematically shame everyone present into forcing Liam to go to school. He looks mutinous about it the entire time, like he thinks the whole interaction is a vast conspiracy orchestrated by the Sheriff and Argent and Scott and Agent McCall all standing around wincing, but he does eventually go.

He also doesn’t say a word to Theo as he’s leaving, but he does give him a long, searching look before he finally slams the Sheriff’s office door shut behind himself.

Argent gives Theo a similar look, Theo’s spine attempting to go rigid under the attention. But he doesn’t say anything, either, at least not directly to Theo: “This can’t be her only group of followers,” he finally says as he’s turning back to the rest of the room. “We’ve got to make sure we’ve identified any and all of her cells before we move to take her, and take _them_ at the same time, or they’re going to metastasize.”

“Sounds oddly familiar,” Agent McCall mutters, and smiles with all teeth when Argent looks at him sharply.

Scott elbows his dad with a quiet rebuke, and Theo forcibly keeps his eyes on the map as everyone in the room shifts uncomfortably, Gerard’s ghost hovering heavy between them until Argent waves a hand through the air like he could dismiss the phantom with the quick slice of his fingers.

“So we all understand the consequences of screwing it up, then,” Argent agrees blandly, and moves on. Theo feels his nostrils flare at the bitter bite to Argent’s scent, and when he glances up, Scott is rubbing at his nose, and Derek has a knuckle pressed up against the bottom of his; he raises an eyebrow when he notices Theo’s attention.

Theo’s phone stays still and silent throughout the day, heavy like a stone and with Theo distractedly, uncomfortably aware of it no matter how much he tries to keep his mind on the piles of surveillance photos scattered around, and the non-magical map that the Sheriff had taped up so they could all stare in grim-mouthed determination at the myriad little clusters of pins marking the known locations of Monroe and her people. He finds himself tapping at it through his jeans’ pocket as he talks through strategies with Parrish and the Sheriff, or vigorously disagrees with a suggestion thrown out by Derek, but Liam doesn’t text—no matter how certain Theo is that he’s stewing in whatever’s going on in his head; in the pinched-mouth way he’d said _how about instead of an apology, you give me an explanation_ —and neither do Corey or Mason.

It lets Theo breathe a little easier as the day wears on, though he can’t keep—and stops trying to keep, after the third or fourth time he catches himself—his fingers away from the unbroken skin of his throat, his fingertips bump-bump-bumping their way down the previously-split open ridge of his Adam’s apple.

But it’s only a temporary reprieve. As it starts to get dark Argent and the Sheriff and Agent McCall finally call it, all three of them breaking off into their own little corners to give orders to their people: Agent McCall to the FBI agents he has staking out various locations, the Sheriff to his deputies staged around the city or detailed to other counties, Argent to his hunting contacts more than willing to defend their now-ragged code. Theo watches it all from his place in one of the chairs sat in front of the Sheriff’s desk, and then he pushes himself to his feet and reaches to swing his jacket off of the back of it.

He nearly winds up smacking Scott in the face with it as Scott pops up behind him; Scott jumps back at the last second and nearly jumps right into Derek, who slides smoothly out of the way with an amused huff. Scott grimaces at himself, and then grins at Derek, and finally turns back to Theo.

“So I was thinking,” he says, his voice trying for offhand but landing somewhere closer to _rehearsed_ , “that you should come over for dinner.”

“Dinner,” Theo repeats carefully as he’s shrugging into his jacket, and then: “What, did Derek update his Facebook status immediately after letting Liam into my apartment last night or something?”

“Maybe I tweeted it,” Derek replies blandly, and smirks when Theo sneers at him.

“ _Anyway_ ,” Scott interrupts, loud and forcefully. “Yes, _dinner_. We’ll have more than enough, and Argent and Derek are already going to be there—” from the look on his face this is news to Derek, “—so it makes sense, right, with the wards?”

He’d started out strong but he ends on the question, clearly unintentionally. Theo feels something spasm in his chest. His phone is still sitting heavy in his pocket, and even if it _wasn’t_ , Theo can feel Corey and Mason like a bruise at the base of his skull, throbbing. Fighting the urge to let his fingers curl into clenched-tight fists in his jacket pockets, Theo meets Scott’s hopeful stare and tries for a smile that gets three-quarters of the way there and then gives up and reveals the grimace underneath.

“I appreciate the offer, but…” Argent is looking at him, his sharp eyes piercing even as he says _no, send Anderson_ , into his phone still pressed to his ear; Theo smothers a flinch. “But I’d really like to just go home, and try and get some actual sleep.”

 _A bad night_ , he’d told Argent earlier, and chances are that Derek and Scott and Liam and even Parrish, too, had all heard him, whether they’d been trying to or not. Scott winces, like he could perfectly picture exactly what _a bad night_ might have entailed—like he had his own experiences to judge by—and then he nods.

“Right, of course. Well,” he says, and without looking at either Derek or Argent. “You’ll still have some time before one of us can come by to deal with the wards, what with—with dinner,” Argent’s eyes narrow, and Derek just looks longsuffering, “if you wanted to, I don’t know, pick up a pizza or something.”

“Okay,” Theo says after a moment, more softly and more sincerely than he’d intended to. “Thanks, Scott.”

He doesn’t pick up a pizza—he still has two slices left of the one Liam had ordered yesterday, after all—but he _does_ take advantage of Scott’s gift—because that’s what it _had_ been, clumsily disguised but clearly genuine—after a half-minute of idling indecision at the intersection of Palmera and Colesville, and heads to Daniel’s Diner. It’d been his go-to, during the weeks he’d spent playing at the bright-eyed high school student and insinuating himself into the McCall pack, but more than that; he runs his fingers across the scuffed back of one of the booths on his way to the counter, his eyes drifting to the one wedged into the back corner. _Three chocolate milkshakes and one strawberry_ , Theo thinks, and feels his heart—his _sister’s_ heart—twist in his chest.

David—Daniel’s son—looks up as he sees Theo coming. “Hey Theo,” he says, his lips curving up in a wide smile. “Been a little while.”

“More than a little,” Theo replies easily, and with his own smile, and then he leans against the counter to wait as David goes to put together _your usual, of course, I assume?_

Liam’s SUV is in the lot when Theo gets back to Derek’s apartment building. Theo hadn’t really expected anything else.

When he gets to his floor, Liam is sitting to the side of Theo’s door, his legs stretched out into the hallway and crossed, and his head tilted back against the wall, eyes closed. He tips his head sideways and slits his eyes open when he hears the elevator ding, but doesn’t move, just watches Theo in silence as Theo walks up.

“How was school?” Theo asks, smirking, but Liam doesn’t take the bait; his expression spasms and then settles with his mouth a tight line.

“Don’t,” he warns shortly, and Theo exhales out, and looks away, and steps over him to get to the door.

He slides it open and steps inside, and then leaves it rolled wide as he heads for the kitchen with his bag of food, leaving Liam to follow him in and close it after himself. Liam does, and closely enough that when Theo turns to get at the mismatched collection of plastic silverware he’d shoved into one of the kitchen drawers—the extent of his kitchenware—he and Liam nearly collide.

“Jesus, Liam,” Theo snaps, startling backwards.

“You still owe me an explanation,” Liam throws back, unapologetic.

Theo feels his jaw tighten. “You already _know_ the explanation,” he counters, and jerks open the drawer he’d already gotten a hand on so that he can retrieve a fork. It bangs into Liam’s hip, since he hadn’t bothered to move back, and Liam hisses and flinches backwards.

“Bull _shit_ ,” Liam disagrees, moving right back into Theo’s space. “You really want to try and claim that last night was about _nightmares?_ ”

Theo deliberately shoves him back a step, and leaves his arm outstretched in warning before Liam can try and reclaim his lost ground. There’s a battle raging in Theo’s head, his chest, part of himself cringing away from the confrontation—part of it slinking _towards_ it, the truth sitting heavy and poised on the end of his tongue—but the part that wins out—the part that Theo _ensures_ wins out—is the bitterness, and the exhaustion, of being pinned up against the frigid glass of the window in the vacation home, staring wide-eyed at Mason as he’d asked, low and dangerous, _do you know what Corey smells like when he thinks of Josh and Tracy?_

“What?” Theo half-snarls, remembered, reflexive adrenaline tasting metallic on his tongue. “Do _you_ really want to try and claim that you’ve never made a mistake bad enough that it keeps you up at night?”

 _That_ lands; Liam flinches back hard, and far enough that Theo can drop his restraining arm, turn jerkily back to his food to keep unpacking it. His appetite is all but gone—the warm, half-remembered feel of the way it’d felt to run his fingers over the cracked vinyl of the booths in Daniel’s Diner gone cold—but it’s the best distraction he’s got. He yanks out the paperboard container holding his reuben and then hisses as he slices a long cut over his fingertip. It closes slow— _too_ slow—as he stares down at it, and Theo feels bile try to rise in his throat as he remembers, instantly and involuntarily, the exact way it’d felt to lay helpless on that kitchen floor while his body desperately tried to stitch his torn throat back together.

And then he jerks when Liam speaks, dragged right back out of his thoughts.

“Yeah, I’ve _made mistakes_ ,” Liam snarls, apparently having recovered from the shock of Theo’s barbed accusation. “But I’ve never had nightmares about them so bad that I couldn’t be _woken up_ from them.”

Theo feels himself pale. “What?”

Liam’s expression is vicious when Theo looks at him, but it’s not—it’s not _anger_. It’s not _just_ anger. “When I got here last night,” he explains tightly, “I didn’t know what was wrong, and your text was…” He stumbles on his explanation, and jerks his eyes away from Theo’s as he swallows, loud in the sudden silence of the apartment. “You’d never _asked_ for help before, and…” Finally he growls—and it _is_ a growl, lupine and low and setting the hairs on the back of Theo’s neck to prickling—out a frustrated noise and snaps, “So I tried to wake you up to ask, to make sure you were alright, and I _couldn’t_.”

Theo just stares at him.

Liam meets his eyes for a half-second, and then jerks his gaze away again. “You were breathing, and your heartbeat seemed fine, if—if slow, so I didn’t call Derek, or Scott, or—” _or Argent_ , Liam doesn’t say, but it hangs there between them, “—but you wouldn’t wake up, and I— _I_ …” He grits his teeth, and finally drags his eyes back to Theo’s. “So _don’t_ tell me it was just nightmares, because it _clearly wasn’t_.”

Theo doesn’t know what to tell him. He hadn’t known that his body had essentially sent him into a medical coma last night, but it made sense; he’s under no delusions about how close he’d come to dying. Jerking his eyes away from Liam’s, Theo looks down at his hands resting on the counter where they’d fallen, and then he flexes his fingers, imagining his claws. _Remembering_ his claws, and the blood—not his own—that often came along with them.

And he knows what he’s going to have to say. What he’s going to have to give up, for the second time today. He smothers the instant, sharp, and _childish_ surge of regret that tries to close up his throat, and breathes deep, and says:

“You sure about that?”

That throws Liam. He’d clearly been expecting a denial, or at the very least a sharp-edged rebuttal; the quiet, rounded corners of Theo’s question leave him scrabbling for a new edge to hang onto, a new response. Theo smirks, humorless.

“C’mon, Liam. You and I both know that you heard what I told Argent at the station,” he says, and experiences an immediate, contradictory flare of bitter victory when Liam’s shoulders bow in, his scent going hot with embarrassment and more than a little shame.

“I wasn’t trying to—” He protests, wincing, and Theo—both because it’s his next line _and_ because he genuinely wants that sting gone from Liam’s scent—interrupts.

“Yeah, but you did.” He shrugs, though keeping the movement loose and easy takes, ironically, a massive amount of effort. “So, you tell me: was it _clearly not_ nightmares?”

He’s led Liam right into a trap and Liam clearly knows it, even if he might not— _definitely doesn’t_ , Theo thinks, hating himself a little as he picks and pries at Liam’s scent to make sure—realize that he hadn’t tripped into it all by himself; Liam too much of a genuinely good person—Liam too much of _Scott’s beta_ —to go ripping open whatever wound he’s convinced himself—that _Theo_ has convinced him—that Theo is carrying around. Ducking his head, Liam brings one arm up to hook around his opposite elbow, and bites his lip hard enough that Theo’s nostrils flare at the quick, there-and-gone bite of blood in the air. Fighting down every immediate instinct he has, Theo lets him stew, and waits.

Finally Liam sucks in a deep breath and says, low and rasping enough that Theo almost misses it. “You never told me any of that.”

 _That_ causes _Theo_ to flinch. He winds up snapping the plastic fork that he hadn’t realized he’d still been holding, and he looks down at the broken halves for a few startled seconds before closing his eyes, and tossing the pieces away.

“Yeah, well,” he says, and then swallows, and leaves it at that.

The silence drags. Even if he didn’t know better than to break it—even if he didn’t know better than to let Liam keep talking himself into accepting Theo’s bare-bones, mine-laden explanation—he wouldn’t know what to say. So he lets it keep crawling along, waiting for some sign, some signal from Liam. But when he gets it, it isn’t what he’s expecting: Liam sucks in another one of those deep breaths, and bites off a sharp sound, and when Theo glances back up at him, he’s looking at Theo strangely.

Theo tries to pick apart the look, his gut twisting uncertainly, but can’t. Finally he gives up and demands, “What?”

Liam jerks and then blinks several times, like _he’d_ been yanked out of his own thoughts. “I—I just…” He stammers, and trails off, jerking his head away. But that doesn’t last long; almost immediately he sneaks a look back at Theo, though the subterfuge is patently ridiculous: Theo’s looking right at him. “It’s just, you think he’s right.”

Now it’s _Theo_ looking at _Liam_ strangely. “What? I think _who_ is—”

“Argent,” Liam interrupts, quickly and a little apologetically. “You think Argent is right.”

Theo’s getting frustrated. “Jesus, Liam. I think Argent is right about _what?_ ”

“About _this!_ ” Liam shoots back, suddenly loud, and a little shrilly. He raises his arms and gestures around, though Theo doesn’t know what he’s gesturing _at_. “About _this_ , and _that_ ,” he gestures roughly at—at the bracelet around Theo’s wrist, and abruptly Theo knows _exactly_ what he’s talking about. “About—about _all of this_. You think…you think he’s—”

“I think I killed three people,” Theo finds himself interrupting, just as loud and just as suddenly.

Liam’s mouth snaps shut immediately after he’s said it, his eyes going startled-wide over the shocked _O_ of his mouth, and Theo hadn’t meant to say it; hadn’t even known he’d been thinking it, hadn’t known it was a truth he’d started holding between his ribs, but.

“I think I killed three people,” he repeats, hoarse this time, and painful through his suddenly-tight throat— _do you know what Corey smells like when he thinks of Josh and Tracy?; you think it was more than you deserved?_ —and then he has to stop, and clear his throat, before he finally gives up on all of that and folds over the counter and buries his head in his hands.

“I think,” he says, his voice muffled by his palms, and the quiet burn of realization in his chest; the sudden leaden weight of the bracelet around his wrist, “he’s trying to protect the people he cares about.”

 _The ones he has left,_ he thinks, but doesn’t say. _You_ , he thinks, his heart—his _sister’s_ heart—twisting, and forces himself _not_ to look at Liam, no matter how much his head wants to turn.

But then it doesn’t matter how hard he tries not to look, because Liam stutters out, “I—I…,” and Theo can’t help himself; he twists around to meet Liam’s wide eyes, set into his cracked-open expression.

He cuts off the second their eyes meet, jerking his own away; Theo has to smother a protest, and nearly bites through his lip to do it. Liam darts a look up at him, there and gone, and winces again.

“I’m sorry,” he finally manages. Then, more loudly: “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…I didn’t mean to…” Theo doesn’t know what Liam thinks he _shouldn’t have_ , or what Liam _hadn’t meant to_ , but he definitely knows the answer when Liam suddenly says, “I can go. I should…I’ll go.”

“No,” Theo says, too fast, almost talking over Liam to do it. Liam cuts off, and stares at him, raw surprise all over his face. “No, please,” he adds, nearly stumbling over the second word. He scrambles to try and correct himself, and only manages to stammer out, “Not if—not if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t,” Liam says, just as fast as Theo had. He looks just as poleaxed as Theo feels after he’s said it, the two of them staring at each other in wide-eyed, broken-open silence.

“Okay,” Theo agrees, a little blankly.

“Okay,” Liam echoes, and doesn’t go.

\---

Theo doesn’t actually mean to fall asleep.

He doesn’t think Liam does either, at least based on the fact that they’re still laying on top of the mismatched collections of blankets Scott had provided Theo when he’d moved into—when he’d been _moved in_ to—his apartment. Theo’s laptop is blank-screened at the bottom of the air mattress between their feet; it’d shut itself off for idleness, apparently. Theo blinks at it, and then finally registers: his left wrist feels heavier than his right. The wards are up.

“Shit,” he murmurs, and only then fully tags the warm weight pressed between his shoulder blades. Liam rolls his forehead some against the ridge of Theo’s spine as he stirs.

“Theo?” Liam rasps.

“Yeah,” Theo says, rotely. Then, wincing: “The wards are up. Whoever came by must have—I’ll call Derek.”

The last part offered in a rush, and accompanied by Theo reaching for his phone. It’s half-buried underneath the cold remnants of his takeout sitting next to the bed, and next to the empty pizza box that Liam had eventually used in lieu of a plate as he’d finished the last of the pizza he’d ordered. But halfway there he freezes.

“No,” Liam protests, still sleep-rough and mumbling. “Don’t.”

His hand is a warm weight along the backs of Theo’s stretched-out fingers, and his chest is a warm press all along Theo’s spine. Theo can feel the steady slow pace of Liam’s breathing, in and out as his chest expands against Theo’s back, Liam’s heart beating a gentle tattoo against Theo’s shoulder. It isn’t until his own lungs start to burn that he realizes he’d been holding his own breath, and lets it out in an unsteady exhale, his fingers fluttering reflexively underneath Liam’s own.

His sudden shuddering exhale seems to shock Liam out of his own stillness. “Oh,” he stutters, “oh, shit, sorry,” as he scrambles back, pulling his heat and his solid grounding presence away from Theo’s back. “I just meant…”

Theo twists his neck around just a bit; just enough that he can catch Liam’s darting, there-and-gone glances. He’s still on his side, with his hand outstretched. He doesn’t, for whatever reason, want to move more than he has to, yet.

“I just meant,” Liam repeats, his throat bobbing as he swallows, loud in the silence of the apartment, “that I’ll call my parents, tell them I’m staying over. No need—no need to wake Derek up.”

 _I don’t know that that’s a good idea_ , Theo nearly says, picturing Argent’s face this morning as he’d demanded _what happened last night_ , but… But whoever had put the wards up had to have known Liam was inside, and they’d done it anyway. Theo curls his outstretched fingers against his palm, and pulls them back in against himself.

“Okay,” he agrees, quiet. Liam darts him another of those quick glances, surprised this time, and then his lips flicker in an equally quick grin before he scrambles to his feet.

He offers to take the remnants of their dinner downstairs, and then scoops up the various cast-offs without waiting for Theo’s agreement or lack thereof as he wedges his phone in between his shoulder and his ear and starts clattering down the stairs. Theo distantly hears him greet _hey, Mom_ , cheerfully, and then he pulls his attention back inwards, and forces himself to his feet to head for the bathroom, his own phone clutched carefully in one hand.

He’d deliberately picked it up so he couldn’t see the screen, and he leaves it facedown on the edge of the bathroom sink now as he shuts the door behind himself, as he gets ready for bed, as he washes his face. It stays still and dark and innocuous but Theo _knows_ better. Actually, _physically_ knows; it’d been the aching, steadily-increasing throb at the base of his skull that’d woken him up, after all. Squeezing his eyes shut, Theo leaves his grimacing face buried in the towel he’d been scrubbing over his dripping skin for a long few seconds, and then he bites off a rough, frustrated noise and straightens up, tossing the towel off to the side as he reaches for his phone.

There are three texts from Corey’s unsaved number. Theo had deliberately chosen his settings so that there’s no preview of the message, just the number and the time of the last-received text: twenty minutes ago. About the time that the pressure tucked up tight against the base of Theo’s skull had forced him awake. Theo taps his thumb against the lit-up screen for a few beats, and then he sighs and unlocks it.

 _When do you think you’ll get here tonight?_ , the first message asks, and Theo can feel the forced normality of the no-doubt carefully— _agonizingly_ —chosen words straining at every syllable. That’d been two hours ago, not long after it’d gotten full dark. Mostly, Theo’s surprised Corey and Mason had lasted that long without texting him. He bites his lip, and looks at the next text.

 _You are coming, right?_ , the second message ventures just over forty-five minutes ago, the attempt at casual stripped away and replaced by the inquiry. Probably Corey had meant it to read as a demand—confident and brash the way he always gets when he’s trying to convince himself that he isn’t terrified by acting as _un_ terrified as he can—but to Theo it comes off as a wavering request; as half a prayer. He pictures Corey huddled in a corner as he writes it—maybe huddled in a bathroom, just like Theo is now—trying to hide his cracking confidence from Mason, who’d probably spent the day trying to lock everything to do with the Beast into some dark corner of his mind; the exact opposite of what he needed to do. The exact opposite of what he’d _been doing_ , on Theo’s orders, for the dubious amount of good it’d done either of them.

But it isn’t until he looks at the final text that he winds up accidentally biting through his lip, still caught between his teeth.

_Theo, please_

“ _Shit_ ,” Theo hisses, his jaw dropping reflexively open at the quick stab of pain. The cut heals fast—he absently notes the speed—but the taste of his blood still causes his stomach to roll, memory and sense-memory all instantly exploding out from the core of himself, and he gags, rough and helplessly, his phone still clutched in his hand clattering against the sink as he braces himself over it.

“Theo?” Liam calls, and from what sounds like—what _is_ , Theo automatically stretching out his hearing to check—right outside the door; Theo freezes.

“I’m fine,” he manages. “Just—just dropped my phone.”

“...okay,” Liam says after a long second, but the remnants of their earlier conversation must still be haunting him because he doesn’t press, surprisingly, just suddenly says, too bright, “I’m going to borrow some sweats to sleep in, okay?,” and immediately suits action to words by too-loudly stomping over to and then yanking open the zipper of the bag where Theo keeps his clothes in a makeshift dresser.

“Okay,” Theo echoes, half under his breath, and straightens back up. Closing his eyes, he presses the back of his hand against his lip, but his skin comes away clean. Theo stares at it for a single second, two, and then he exhales out roughly and unlocks his phone again.

 _I can’t_ , he types, and sends. _Liam invited himself over_ , he adds almost immediately, and with a strange twist to his stomach as he stares at his own claim; at a truth that still somehow feels like a lie.

Theo’s caught up enough in his thoughts that his phone starting to vibrate causes him to jump. He’d been mentally prepared for a return text but not for the way the vibration keeps going, seeming impossibly loud in the enclosed space of the bathroom; Theo hisses and hurries to reject the call, his eyes flicking up and out towards the door, where he can sense the rhythm of Liam’s piqued heartbeat, his sudden stillness. Biting off a curse, Theo thumbs back into his and Corey’s text thread.

 _Corey_ , he chastises, and tries to tell himself that the bolt of _something_ that goes shocking down his spine is irritation.

But it’s not. Theo knows it’s not.

 _Tell Mason_ , he types, and then stops. Corey doesn’t send anything else but Theo can all but _taste_ his apprehension, his buzzing impatience, and even if he couldn’t; he takes one hand off his phone to dig it hard and into the pressure sitting tucked up at the base of his skull, and then he puts it back.

 _Tell Mason it wasn’t his fault_ , he sends, and then: _I’ll be there tomorrow night_. Theo stares down at the two texts stacked on top of each other for a long moment, and then adds, _I promise_.

When he opens the door, Liam is sitting on the air mattress, eyelids heavy and with one of Theo’s pillows pulled loosely into his lap. He grins absently when he notices Theo’s attention, and knuckles at one of his eyes.

“Probably a good thing I’m not going to try and drive myself home,” he says, offhand and still looking somewhere to the right of Theo’s left knee. Theo’s shirt on his shoulders is just slightly too big, and it’s hanging just off center of his neck, the collar dipping down to reveal a stretch of bare collarbone. “I’d probably drive myself into a ditch or something.”

Theo feels something wedge up tight in his throat as he stares at him, no matter how much he tries to tell himself there’s nothing there. “Can’t have that,” he finally manages, and mentally blames the croak in his voice on their interrupted sleep; his fingers tighten around his phone, still in his hand, still and silent and dark-screened.

Liam grins again, less absently this time, and then stands up, and slips past him for the bathroom.

Neither of them remember to set an alarm before they pass back out, but it winds up not mattering; Theo comes awake to Derek tapping the toe of his boot against the air mattress by his and Liam’s heads. Theo feels a reflexive bolt of panic jolt up his spine as Derek looks down at them half-tangled in the blankets and therefore with each other, but Derek just raises a single, unimpressed eyebrow and taps his boot a little harder against the mattress.

“You,” he says, when Liam startles awake and then blinks up at him, “need to get to school. You,” he adds, switching his attention to Theo, “need to get up so we can get to the station.”

“...right,” Theo replies, and winds up nearly entirely drowned out as Liam groggily checks his phone, apparently clocks the time, and swears as he scrambles to his feet.

There’s coffee and the sad remnants of a collection of bagels when Derek and Theo get to the station, and also Argent, the Sheriff, and Agent McCall, who have clearly already been at it for several hours. Theo nearly asks where Parrish is when the phone on the Sheriff’s desk suddenly squawks, and moots his question; Parrish, out in the middle of California and reporting on what he’s found. After an uncertain minute where Theo half-expects Argent to say something to him—Argent’s eyes on his face as he and Derek walk in, before Argent turns his attention back forward and answers Parrish’s latest question—Theo shakes himself, and grabs a paper cup of coffee and a bagel, and settles in on the couch next to Scott, who grins a sleepy good morning at him.

They make progress; they plan. The logistics of the thing were daunting, definitely, but straightforward for all of that; between Argent’s hunters, Agent McCall’s FBI agents, and the Sheriff’s deputies, they’d managed to locate and cover all of Monroe’s various camps. Or all the ones they _knew of_ , anyway; Theo frowns at the map up on the Sheriff’s wall as he listens to the three of them and Derek talk back and forth, half-sat on the Sheriff’s desk with his three-quarters empty cup of lukewarm coffee in his hand.

Scott steps up next to him. “You seem skeptical,” he murmurs quietly, his eyes flicking to the cluster of his dad and Argent and the Sheriff and Derek a few feet away as he says it.

Theo shrugs, a little roughly. “It’s just hard to prove a negative.”

Scott frowns, first at him and then at the map. “You think we’re missing groups?”

“Maybe,” Theo replies, and grimaces apologetically at Scott when Scott looks back over at him. “Maybe not.”

Scott grimaces back, but laughs a little besides.

It’s late by the time Theo gets back to his apartment, his mind still feeling stuffed full and whirring of the plan to finally take down Monroe—the shape of it finally starting to come together—as he wanders absently through his doorway, Derek just behind him. He stops when he hears Derek’s footsteps stop, and turns around to look at him.

“What?” He asks, the second he catches the look on Derek’s face.

Derek doesn’t respond right away, just stands in the doorway with the fingers of one of his hands tapping against his thigh as he studies Theo, eyes narrow and expression thoughtful. In addition to his tapping fingers Theo notes his tapping foot, one toe cocked back like Derek was going to—like he wanted—to take a step back, but he doesn’t. Theo frowns, and nearly asks again.

“Nothing,” Derek says, before he can, then: “I don’t need to wait for Liam to get here, do I?”

He smirks at Theo’s unimpressed eye-roll, and finally lifts his arm and performs the hand gestures to activate the wards. But he leaves his closed fist hovering in the air once he’s done, some of the humor falling away from his face and leaving that quiet, searching look from before. Theo stares at him through the shimmering barrier of the wards as they settle, thrown.

But Derek suddenly shakes himself, and drops his arm. “Have a good night, Theo,” he says, and turns on his heel and walks away before Theo can respond.

“Night, Derek,” Theo murmurs, almost to himself, and then he heads for his kitchen and puts his phone in the middle of the island, and keeps a close eye on it as he moves around, as he pulls together what food he has in his— _embarrassing, the state of your cabinets is embarrassing_ —cabinets into an acceptable dinner.

And then, later, with his kitchen spotless, and his hearing stretched out throughout the building—to three floors _above_ in the building, where he can hear nothing but Derek’s sleep-slow heartbeat—he steels himself, and takes hold of the side of his left thumb with his right palm, and he breaks his hand.

Neither Corey or Mason are there to greet him when he gets to the vacation home. Theo hadn’t expected the latter but the lack of the former surprises him a bit, and he’s wary—warier—as he steps through the unlocked side door and makes his way deeper into the house. When he closes his eyes and listen he can hear two heartbeats in the basement, both quick-tripping, and he winces.

He winces, but he nonetheless slows as he comes to the section of hallway that branches off towards the living room and the kitchen, until finally he stops, one hand on the jamb as he looks out over the tile of the room. The _spotless_ tile of the room, and Theo stares, caught, at the section of floor where he knows—he _knows_ —he’d lain bleeding out and dying, and sees nothing.

“It took all day to get the blood out,” Corey suddenly says from behind him, and Theo startles badly enough that he nearly puts his suddenly-clawed fingers through the wood of the door jamb he’d still been holding.

“Jesus _christ_ ,” he gasps out, and folds over some to brace his hands on his knees as he tries to wrestle back control of his adrenal gland.

Corey’s grimacing, when Theo tilts his head to look over at him. “Sorry.”

Theo shakes his head, mutely; the best he can do to acknowledge and dismiss Corey’s unnecessary apology given his abruptly vice-tight throat. Corey manages to meet his eyes for a half-second longer, and then he jerks his own away, his scent a wild, vacillating riot that burns at Theo’s nose.

“Sorry,” he says again, just as unnecessarily, and Theo swallows roughly, and straightens up.

“Corey…” Theo starts to say, though he almost immediately trails off, unsure of what the next words might be.

It matters less than it should; Corey talks over him as he says, too-loud for the silence of the house and echoing strangely through the elegantly-decorated, empty hallways and rooms: “Mason’s downstairs, if you—if you…”

He doesn’t seem to know how his own sentence ends. Theo doesn’t either, but he knows how he _wants_ it to, even with the apprehension that starts to curdle in his gut, that starts to twist, and writhe, as he very purposefully _doesn’t_ look at the tellingly spotless stretch of kitchen floor where Mason had nearly killed him, and so he steels himself, and nods out, towards the stairwell down to the basement.

“So let’s go downstairs,” he tells Corey quietly, and makes sure not to let any of the chaos making a mess of the inside of his ribs onto his face.

Corey stares at him, the exact opposite— _everything_ he must be feeling visible underneath his cracked-open expression—and then he very visibly steels _himself_ , and nods, and twists jerkily around on a single heel to lead the way.

Theo follows him from a few steps back, and wonders if it’s intentional—wonders if Corey _knows_ —that he’s keeping his body firmly in front of Theo’s, that he’s shifting to the side every time Theo does; that he slows to match Theo’s pace when Theo pauses involuntarily at the stop of the stairs, his own breathing starting to speed. He flinches when he looks back up at Theo from a few steps down, and Theo realizes that he must have lost control of his expression; that some of what he’s thinking, feeling, _fearing_ , but be showing.

“Theo,” Corey starts, but Theo shakes his head sharply.

“Go,” he orders, more harshly than he’d intended; more harshly than he’d wanted.

But after another half-beat of hesitation Corey does go, and Theo exhales, and closes his eyes, and then follows him.

When they reach the bottom of the stairs Mason is nowhere to be seen, and if Theo wasn’t—what he is, if it wasn’t for _you-and-I-share-an-ancestor_ , then he’d almost wonder if Corey had been lying, or if Mason had ran off in the intervening time between Corey coming upstairs alone and his returning back downstairs _not_ alone. But Theo can _hear_ Mason, his frantic, rushing heartbeat, and he can _smell_ him, dark and crackling through with the Beast’s specific scent, but more than any of those things…

“Mason?” Corey ventures, just as Theo brings a hand up to dig it at the aching pressure at the base of his skull.

The basement lights up with a dull, ghostly glow, and Theo looks straight into Mason’s shifted, pale-flared eyes.

He’d scrambled to his feet from behind the bar, and he keeps it between them like a barrier, like a bulwark, even as he stares wide-eyed back at Theo. It’s hard to tell in the dark of the room, but Theo thinks he can see the strange, sinuous lines of the Beast’s shift tattooed across Mason’s skin, his veins rising and rising with the Beast’s power to press at the fragile-seeming shell of _Mason_ containing it. But only fragile- _seeming_ , Theo thinks, and it takes every ounce of control he has not to touch his throat.

They stand there in silence for a few crawling, heavy-laden seconds—Corey still half-poised in front of Theo, knowingly or not—and then Mason opens his mouth and starts to say, “Theo—,” before abruptly stopping and slapping his hands over his mouth instead.

But Theo had still seen the brief flash of fangs, and he’s taken a step back before he can stop himself.

“ _Damn it_ ,” Mason grits out, and with feeling, even as he whirls around so that his back is to Corey and Theo instead. “I’m sorry, I’m _sorry—_ ”

“Mason,” Theo and Corey interrupt near-simultaneously, and then stop and jerk around to stare at each other in surprise.

It leaves another silence for Mason’s self-flagellation to fill, and he bites off another harsh, high sound and says again, “I’m _sorry_ , I can’t, it won’t stop—”

“Mason,” Theo tries again, more quietly this time. Corey shoots him a desperate glance that goes wide and a little panicked when Theo starts to move past him around the side of the bar.

The squeak of Corey’s shoes on the tile as he makes a grab for Theo’s arm—Theo dodging away from it—must alert Mason to something changing, because his head jerks upwards, out of his clutching hands. He spots Theo, closer than he had been and now without the bar between them, and he makes another of those high sounds and fumbles several steps backwards. In his panic he gets his feet tangled up underneath himself, and Theo realizes what’s about to happen even before Mason does; he darts forward.

Try as he might—and he _does_ try—Mason can’t stop Theo from getting ahold of him and he can’t stop Theo from yanking him back onto his feet. He freezes once back upright—they both do—his fingers clenched hard around Theo’s forearms and his eyes wide in his torn open expression as he stares at Theo; as they stare at each other.

And then Mason’s eyes, still ghostly blue and glowing, drop down to Theo’s throat.

“Please don’t say you’re sorry again,” Theo finds himself begging, the words tripping themselves loose of the cage of his teeth before he can stop them.

Mason jerks and blinks a few times, clearly startled. He opens his mouth once, closes it again, and then opens it once more.

“I am, though,” he protests quietly, surprise or raw feeling or both scrubbing his tone clean.

“I know,” Theo tells him, and does.

\---

Art by [ArtZeppo](https://artzeppo.tumblr.com/)

\---

Eventually Theo manages to coax Mason upstairs, and then to eat something, and then finally into an exhausted sleep, Mason curled up seemingly-small underneath a blanket on the couch in the vacation home’s living room.

“I’ve been trying to get him to do all that all day,” Corey observes after Mason has finally dropped off, appearing in the entryway into the room with one hand wrapped loose and then tight, loose and then tight around the jamb.

Theo glances up at him, absently shifting when the movement causes Mason’s bent knees—Theo perched on the edge of the couch—to dig lightly into his ribs. There’d been something in Corey’s tone, some space that could have held resentment, or reproach, but what Theo hears instead—what he _thinks_ he hears—is relief, plain and bare. Corey catches him looking and smiles, shakily, one hand rising to knuckle at one of his eyes. Theo manages to look at him for a second longer, and then he grimaces, and looks back down at Mason.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and anticipates the question he can all but feel building in Corey’s throat by immediately clarifying, “For not getting here earlier. He must have been…I’m sorry.”

Corey doesn’t respond, and for long enough that Theo drags his gaze up and out from the furrowed crease between Mason’s brows back to Corey. He’s not looking at Theo, though: his gaze is focused to the side, out of the living room’s massive windows—one of them marred by five deep, parallel gouges, and Theo barely manages to smother a wince when he spots them—with his hand drifting slowly back to his side and his mouth set in one tight line.

“Corey?” Theo prompts quietly, after another few dragging seconds.

Corey jumps, slightly, and then visibly shakes himself, and when he smiles the attempt at humor is transparent enough that it hooks deep into Theo’s guts and _tugs_. “Frankly, I— _we_ —are just grateful you came back at all.”

Theo stares at him, can feel his expression going slack with surprise as he does. Corey flinches and looks away, but he doesn’t try to demur, or take it back. The pinched twist to the corner of his mouth grabs hold of that hooked feeling in Theo’s gut and yanks harder, and Theo has to swallow past his suddenly-tight throat; has to jerk his eyes back down and reach out to tug the blanket further up Mason’s shoulders, tuck it more firmly around his sleep-heavy limbs.

“Well,” he says. Croaks, really. “I mean, you are still blackmailing me. Technically.”

When he forces his reluctant gaze back to Corey, Corey is already staring at him. Theo stills under the scrutiny, caught by the attention. “Yeah,” Corey agrees after a too-long beat. “Yeah, right. Right, I guess I…I am doing that. Technically.”

They stare at each other for a second longer, and then almost simultaneously jerk their heads sideways to look elsewhere. Theo looks back down at Mason automatically, a little helplessly; he isn’t sure where Corey looks, can’t see him with the way he keeps his attention focused firmly down. Mason stirs some, the furrow between his brow deepening—and the sense of him, curled up tight at the base of Theo’s skull, leadening—and Theo grimaces, and then closes his eyes, and exhales out slow; slow. When he opens them back up, Mason’s expression is a little easier.

“Actually, Corey, about that…” Theo finds himself saying, then: “Or not about _that_ , but…” He trails off again, and then finally huffs out a frustrated breath and scrubs the heels of his palms over his face before dropping them back down, and looking back at Corey. “Thank you,” he tells him, looking straight into Corey’s curious but so obviously _exhausted_ eyes, “for getting me back. For—for keeping me from getting caught.”

Corey’s eyebrows shoot up. “I thought you said—”

“I did,” Theo cuts him off. _Has_ to cut him off. “I did, and I meant it,” he repeats, more quietly, and with one hand rising to rest on Mason’s arm to soothe the way he stirs some at Theo’s too-quick, too-loud interruption. “You shouldn’t have done it, it really _wasn’t_ your problem, and it _was_ a stupid risk, but…” He sucks in a deep breath. “But thank you, for doing it anyway.”

Something about the shape of Corey, framed in the open doorway—something about the _feel_ of him, tucked up tight at the base of Theo’s skull, pressed up close enough to the sense of Mason that the feeling of both of them blurs—eases. Theo finds himself smiling helplessly back when Corey smiles helplessly at him, and beside him on the couch Mason suddenly huffs out a small, quiet sound, and rolls over onto his back, his legs stretching out and his head tilted back, away, and leaving the smooth line of his throat exposed in one long arch. Theo stares, thrown, at least until Corey speaks again.

“So does that mean they… Does that mean Argent and the others…” He doesn’t finish, but Theo doesn’t need him to. He shakes his head.

“They don’t suspect anything about you,” he assures Corey quietly, and feels a flare of relief warm the inside of his ribs as Corey sags some against the wall with a quiet, heartfelt exhalation. But then something seems to occur to him, and he straightens right back up.

“But they do suspect something about _you_ ,” he interprets, his eyes roving over Theo’s face.

Theo shrugs, though he can’t stop himself from looking back down at Mason; from looking _away_ from Corey. “They always suspect something about me.” Corey starts to protest, or maybe apologize, but Theo stops him before he can get more than the start of a word out. “It’s nothing I can’t handle, Corey. It’s nothing I haven’t _been_ handling.”

That may not be true—Argent’s eyes hard on his face, the exact shape of Derek’s mouth as he’d asked _so why the midnight call for help_ —but Corey doesn’t need to know that. Corey frowns at him for another few seconds, and then he jerks a nod, and finally tips his head to rest his temple against the wall, his eyes closing. This time it’s _Theo_ who frowns.

“But that isn’t what’s worrying you,” Theo realizes slowly. “Or not the _only_ thing,” he amends, and knows he’s right when Corey flinches bodily.

For a moment Theo thinks he’s going to have to try and pry whatever it is out of him, but after another half-second of hesitation, Corey explains, “Mason, he…he asked me to do something.” A rueful smile takes over his mouth, entirely belied by the tightness to the skin around his eyes. “Begged me to do something, more like. Wouldn’t _stop_ begging, until I agreed.”

“Okay,” Theo says, because Corey’s waiting for it, a pause left pointedly unfilled.

Corey shoots him a pained grin. Or an attempt at one, anyway; the next instant he lets it drop off his face, and looks away again. “He said that—that it’s already been proven that the Beast is—that _he_ is, now—almost impossible to stop. And he said that—that with what you said about my new, my new…” He holds up a hand demonstratively, and even as Theo watches the skin of it goes translucent; wraithlike. He swallows again, and loud enough that Theo can hear his throat click. “He made me promise that I’d come up with a way to stop him, if something…if he lost…”

He drops his hand away, the skin and muscle and bone once more solid. But even once it’s back low by his hip he still holds it out in front of him, clenching and unclenching it as his eyes rove over and over his flexing fingers.

“He wouldn’t calm down and try to rest until I figured out a way,” he concludes. “So I… So I did.”

Theo studies him for a long few seconds. “Corey…”

“Don’t ask me what it is,” Corey interrupts, all in a rush. “Not right now. Just…please.”

“Okay,” Theo agrees quietly, even though he’s not sure he _had_ been going to ask, really; there’s something particularly awful, something that Theo instinctually shies away from, in trying to imagine Corey— _stopping_ Mason, at all. Corey flashes him another of those pained smiles and goes back to sagging against the doorway, and Theo frowns. “When was the last time you slept?”

Corey shrugs, but he also winces. “I don’t know. A while ago,” he answers vaguely, and without looking Theo in the eye.

 _Like over two days ago_ , Theo interprets; before Mason had lost control and attacked Theo. Theo exhales, and pushes himself to his feet, and takes the few steps he needs to put him in reach of Corey. Once there he reaches out and gets ahold of a fistful of Corey’s shirt, and pulls him off him off the wall before reversing direction and pushing him back and into the hallway, towards the bedrooms.

“Wha—?” Corey starts to protest, stumbling, but Theo just prods him another step back.

“Go sleep,” he orders. “I’ll keep an eye on Mason.”

Corey blinks at him, hovering in the middle of the hallway with one foot still cocked backwards from where he’d used it to catch his balance. Theo can see the protest forming in his throat—he can see the way Corey’s eyes flick over his shoulder, to Mason—and then Corey huffs a low, soft laugh.

Theo feels his eyes narrow curiously. “What?”

“Nothing,” Corey replies quickly, his voice still threaded through with amusement. “Just, our roles are usually reversed, here.”

Theo rolls his eyes, and flicks his fingers down the hallway in a clear gesture: _go, shoo_. Corey grins, some of the pinched tension falling away from the skin around his eyes, and—after he takes one last glance at Mason—he nods, and bites his lip, and pivots on his heel to start down the hallway. Theo watches him go until he disappears into the bedroom that he and Mason had claimed, and then he twists his head over his shoulder so he can glance at Mason, too.

He spends a few quiet hours sprawled in the loveseat in the living room next to Mason’s still-sleeping form, the lights left off and his eyes flared as he passes the time messing around on his phone, one ear on Mason beside him and the other on Corey down the hall. But after a while his phone battery starts to get alarmingly low, and—not wanting to risk waking up either Mason or Corey by digging around their various effects looking for a charger—he bites his lip and then runs quickly out to his truck to get the one he keeps coiled up in his glove compartment.

When he gets back, cord in hand, the couch is empty.

His initial blast of panic is immediately shut down by both his senses—his ears and nose catching Mason’s heartbeat and the trail of his scent—and the pressure tucked up tight at the base of Theo’s skull. Theo follows them out of the living room and through the patio door, and steps out onto the vacation’s home porch quietly—his hearing stretched back towards the steady pace of Corey’s sleep-slow breathing—but not _too_ quietly, Theo all too aware of Mason leaning against the patio railing. He glances back at Theo as Theo is closing the door behind himself, and his expression goes raw like he can see exactly what Theo’s thinking.

Theo hesitates for a second, and then he shrugs, apologetic but also—not. Mason looks at him for a second longer, and then he exhales out roughly and turns back forward.

“Eight hundred extenuating circumstances,” he says as Theo is slowly making his way forward to join him. “That’s what I told Liam, after he tried to kill Scott.”

Theo flinches, but Mason isn’t even looking at him; his gaze is focused out, towards the glittering sprawl of the nearest city a few miles away.

“I never really believed it, though,” he confesses quietly. “Not then, and not—not ever. I always just thought…” He trails off, and then shakes his head. “I don’t know what I thought.” He sighs, and the smile he shoots Theo afterwards is rueful, more than a little pained; self-deprecating. “I guess the joke’s on me.”

He manages to hold his composure for a few seconds longer, and then it collapses in on itself; Mason groans, low and hurt, and folds over the railing as he drops his head into his hands. Theo has to smother the sudden urge to reach forward, put a hand on his arm or try to pull his crooked-digging fingers away from his face, the feel of Mason pressed up against the top of his spine gone twisting and turning; hot and barbed.

“What do I do _now?_ ” Mason chokes out, muffled by the press of his palms. “How am I supposed to… _What_ am I supposed to _—_ ”

And Theo finds himself interrupting before he’s made the conscious decision to do so. “You come home.”

Mason stills—and Theo does, too, can feel the surprise blanking his own face—and then drops his hands, and turns to look at Theo incredulously. “ _What?_ ”

But the surprise that Theo had felt is melting away into something else; something solid and held fast and right-feeling. “You come home,” he repeats, more quietly but no less certainly.

Mason stares at him. “You can’t be—I nearly _kill you_ ,” he finally says, “and you take that as a sign that I should _go home?_ ”

“I take it as a sign that you’ve stopped fighting the Beast. That you’ve stopped,” he hesitates, but only for a split-second. “That you’ve stopped fighting who you are, now.”

Mason keeps staring at him, but as the seconds drag by his gaze becomes less incredulous and more searching, his eyes narrowing. Theo stays still under the scrutiny; is surprised, a little, at how easy it is to do.

“You really believe that,” Mason finally says. “I can tell that you…” One of his hands rises to press at the base of his own skull. “Huh.”

Theo has to look away then, caught by the way Mason’s fingers are playing lightly over the top of his spine; at the way he can feel the echo of Mason’s wonder unfurling at the top of his own. But he doesn’t look away long: Mason laughs, suddenly, low and light and genuine.

“What?” Theo asks curiously, turning back to glance at him.

Mason smiles, and then tries to pull his lips between his teeth to control it, and then finally gives it up and lets it bloom fully on his face. “It’s just…” He starts. “You said I should _come home_. Not—not _go home_. Not _go back to Beacon Hills_.”

Theo realizes what he’s getting at, and for only the second time in—a surprising stretch of it, considering that less than two days and fifty feet away ago he was bleeding to death, his throat ripped open by Mason’s claws, he feels a spike of panic bolt down his spine, for all that Mason’s smile is easy and pleased and so shyly _happy_ , and on his behalf. Swallowing, Theo shoves it away—along with the beginnings of a realization, or a possibility, that Mason’s words have set off in his chest—and jerks his gaze away.

“Yeah, well,” Theo says, trying for dry but not—really getting there. “Don’t read too much into it.”

But Mason just says, “I don’t know,” and then, when Theo looks at him, smiles. “I think I might.”

Theo stares at him. Mason smiles again, and then his attention catches, his head tilting up, and out, back towards the house.

“Corey’s waking up,” he announces, and Theo frowns lightly. He hadn’t _heard_ , but— _there_ ; Corey’s pulse starts to speed, the rhythm of his breath hitching. “C’mon,” Mason says, and tilts his head back towards the house.

He heads for the door without waiting for Theo, and after a second—Theo follows.

\---

“So that’s it, then,” Scott says the next day, slow and a little wary like he suspects it might be a trap, or like the act of declaring it out loud might somehow jinx them all. “We just…wait for two more days for my dad’s and yours and Argent’s people to finish getting in place, and then go?”

“I mean, it’s a little more complicated than that,” the Sheriff replies wryly. Scott grins at him, and the Sheriff grins back. “But sure, that’s about it.”

Theo notes the exchange absently, but the logistics that are concerning him have nothing to do with the assembled group’s planned takedown of Monroe. _If we—if you_ , he’d swiftly corrected, _time this right, then you can take advantage of Scott’s and Argent’s and the others’ focus on Monroe to short circuit their inevitable reaction to your disappearance, and reappearance._ Mason and Corey had looked at each other after he’d said it, and then looked at him, and then Corey had said, _that is_ cold, low and near whistling _._

 _But he’s not wrong_ , Mason had countered quietly, and had met Theo’s eyes head-on when Theo had glanced at him.

Something prods him in the leg, and Theo jumps. Scott raises an eyebrow from his seat in front of the Sheriff’s desk when Theo turns to look at him, the foot he’d used to jab Theo in the thigh dropping back down to the floor with an easy, audible _thunk_. “You still look skeptical.”

Theo smirks, the frisson of adrenaline that’d bolted up his spine easily ignored. “I still think it’s hard to prove a negative.”

Scott grins again, and lets it go to refocus on the ongoing discussion in the office, and then twenty minutes later he lets out a heartfelt sigh, absently checks his phone as he leans his chair back on two legs, and then nearly sends himself flailing backwards when he suddenly swears and tries to scramble too-quickly upright.

“Crap, crap, we’re going to be late,” he exclaims breathily as he does, just barely managing to grab the edge of the Sheriff’s desk to haul himself back upright.

Theo doesn’t know who the _we_ is supposed to include, and no idea where that mysterious _we_ might be late to, so he just smirks lightly and looks back down at the notepad in his lap, his mind still on logistics. On _so when should we come back, you think?_ , Corey unable to hide the excitement, and the impatience, and the fear, too, in his voice, on Mason adding firmly _we can’t risk distracting_ _them in the middle of taking down Monroe, or anything_ , and only realizes that Scott had been looking at _him_ when he’d pronounced that _we_ when Scott _continues_ looking at him.

“What?” He asks, and then glances at the room where Argent, the Sheriff, and Agent McCall—Derek still off with Cora and Malia helping Parrish and the other BHSD deputies track Monroe’s people—are all looking expectantly at him, too.

“We’re going to be _late_ ,” Scott repeats, now looking a little exasperated.

“Late _where?_ ” Theo shoots back, a little annoyed. “I don’t think my empty apartment keeps a strict timetable in terms of when it expects me home.”

Scott rolls his eyes, unimpressed. “The exhibition game between Beacon Hills and Devenford is tonight, remember?”

Of course Theo _remembers_ —Liam had yet to shut up about it. But: “And that has what to do with _me_ , exactly?”

Scott’s brow furrows, and he glances away from Theo to Argent, who’d lost interest in the exchange at one point and had refocused on the map he’d taken down from the wall and sprawled over the Sheriff’s desk, and who doesn’t bother looking up even though Theo knows that he is _one-hundred percent_ aware of Scott’s glance. Suddenly Theo gets it. Or _thinks_ he does, anyway.

“You told Liam no _weeks_ ago,” he reminds Argent, his tone half an accusation.

Argent is unmoved. “So he’ll be surprised to see you there, then,” he replies blandly, and continues to ignore Theo staring at him for the several seconds it takes Theo to switch his confused gaze back to Scott, who turns to grin—wide and a little blinding—back.

Not knowing what else to do and still completely thrown, Theo stands when Scott does. Scott says something to his father as he swings on his jacket, fingers absently working behind his neck to fix his collar, but Theo can’t help himself; he finds himself ignoring that to look back at Argent.

“Derek’s still out of town,” he reminds him.

“Yes, he is,” Argent agrees absently, and leans over to check whatever he’d just written against another part of the map.

“And you’re staying here to keep quarterbacking everyone getting in place,” Theo presses, still staring at the top of his tilted-down head.

“True,” Argent agrees just as easily.

Theo bites off a frustrated noise. “So is Scott the one who’s going to put up the wards tonight?”

Beside him, Scott cuts off his conversation with his dad mid-sentence to look over. His brow has furrowed again and he looks like he wants to say something—and say something to _Theo_ , not Argent, this soft sort of expression all over his face—but Argent beats him to it.

“If he feels like it, sure,” Argent answers, and only looks up at Theo _then_ , steady and relaxed and with—not a dare, but a _challenge_ in the easy slope to his shoulders, his bracing open hand on the desk, and Theo realizes he’s staring back at him with his mouth dropped open, his expression slack with shock, but can’t stop himself.

Argent holds his eyes for a few long, dragging seconds, and then he reminds them and the rest of the room, “You’re going to be late,” and drops his attention back to the map; a clear dismissal.

Theo still doesn’t move until Scott puts a hand on his arm—a too-gentle hand, a _spooked-horse_ hand—and jerks his chin towards the door.

They _are_ late. Scott makes their excuses—appropriately circumscribed—as he leads Theo up into the stands where Ms. McCall and the Geyers are sitting huddled in winter coats and scarves and hats, their gloved hands wrapped around thermoses of what Theo can smell is hot chocolate. Hot chocolate with a little kick to it, he realizes, and smiles helplessly back at Mrs. Geyer when she smiles at him and makes room for him on their bleacher.

“Good to see you,” she says as he slides in next to her, Scott squeezing in on his other side and next to his mother. “Liam said you weren’t going to be able to come.”

“Change of plans,” Theo answers, and can’t help stealing a look at Scott as he says it; Scott catches him at it with a calm, level look back, and then quirks him a small smile and looks away, out towards the field.

Beacon Hills loses, though not by much—and though Liam nearly gets taken out by a Devenford player when he suddenly freezes in the middle of a play and his head jerks around to stare at Theo and Scott now squeezed into the stands as well—and the mood at the table of the restaurant that they all pile into after, Theo dragged bemusedly along in their wake, is high. Theo winds up spending most of the dinner dodging Liam’s expansively gesturing hands and elbows as he recounts plays from the first part of the game that Theo and Scott had missed, Liam’s eyes bright and his adrenaline still up and his scent—buried underneath the plasticky, sweaty mess of his jersey, anyway—is crisp, and clear, like the way the air tastes when Theo steps outside of Derek’s apartment building on cold winter mornings, pine and Preserve and earth.

Theo finds himself chasing it down throughout their meal, untangling it from Scott’s and Ms. McCall’s and Liam’s parents and the controlled-chaos of the restaurant around them, wanting the bite of it back in his mouth.

That’s probably why, in hindsight, he doesn’t recognize the mistake he makes until he’s already made it.

Liam’s telling of stories about the game had segued neatly—and inevitably—into telling stories about Finstock, Scott occasionally chiming in with his own to the continued delight and breathless laughter of his mom and Liam’s parents, and he’s in the middle of one involving Corey and Mason and a really ill-timed interruption of an admittedly really ill-timed bout of PDA when it happens.

“So they’re hiding in the supply closet, right, when Finstock opens the door and catches them,” Liam is saying, “and apparently they all spend like, a good ten seconds just staring at each other in horror, and then Finstock just—just _reaches_ _past them_ to grab a bottle of bleach, and says—and _says—_ ”

Liam’s cracking himself up too much by this point to continue, and Theo—grinning himself and still focused on the crisp clean taste of Liam’s scent on his tongue—finishes for him, “‘Good hustle out there today, Bryant.’”

Ms. McCall and the Geyers and Scott all lose it, curling over the table as they gasp for air and Mrs. Geyer burying her peals of laughter against her husband’s shoulder, but Liam stills. He stills and looks sharply at Theo, narrow-eyed surprise all over his face, and Theo looks back at him for a second in confusion before abruptly paling as he realizes what he’d just done.

“Right,” Liam says, a little blankly, though no one else at the table seems to catch his sudden change in tone. After another few seconds Liam clears his throat, and forces a smile that’s just a little too rigid back on his face, and concludes, “And then Finstock just leaned back out, and closed the door again.”

The others all crack up again, apparently oblivious to Liam’s sudden change in mood and Theo’s sudden stillness. Mrs. Geyer takes up the story-telling mantle after that to share a genuinely hilarious and charming story of her own high school antics, her husband and Ms. McCall and Scott all goading her on, but Liam just keeps looking at Theo, his scent in Theo’s mouth cloying some as he looks, and looks, and looks, and keeps looking until his mom says something that’s apparently some kind of familial inside-joke and nudges him in the ribs. He jolts at that but manages to deliver his line without raising any flags, the table devolving into breathless laughter again, and Theo uses Liam’s sudden distraction to jerk his gaze away, and down.

He doesn’t look back at Liam the rest of the night.

They spill out into the parking lot a little while later to head home, the Geyers and Ms. McCall breaking off with cheerful waves and called goodbyes as they weave their ways through the scattered cars to their own. Scott lingers just long enough to look Theo directly in the eye and say _I’m pretty beat, I’m going to head home_ with a deliberate amount of emphasis, and then he, too, pivots on his heel and jogs a little for the Jeep parked a few rows away.

It leaves Theo and Liam standing next to each other on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Theo swallows, and starts to turn towards the direction of his truck as he opens his mouth to say a stilted _night, Liam_ , when Liam suddenly speaks instead.

“I didn’t know you spent time with Corey or Mason without me, before they disappeared,” he says, his tone light and conversational—too light, and too conversational—as he jams his hands in his pockets and looks too-idly out over the parking lot.

Theo recognizes the trap but not any graceful way out of it. “I don’t—” He starts to say, but Liam talks over him.

“And I don’t remember either of them ever telling that story when you were there,” he concludes, his tone and posture and entire demeanor still trying—and failing—for easy, and unconcerned.

Theo hesitates, but only for a beat. “I guess you must have told me, then,” he says, and shrugs easily when Liam glances over at him. His voice comes out just as easy, and he counts his own heartbeat in his ears—steady, and even—though it’s taking every ounce of his control to manage both as Liam continues to look at him, to search his face.

“Sure,” Liam agrees finally. “I guess I must have,” he adds, the forced lightness in his voice now gone like it’d never been there, his tone nearly flat. “After all, what other explanation is there?”

But he doesn’t look away from Theo as he says it.

So Theo swallows, and looks away first. “I should get going,” he says, and forces himself to take a step towards his truck. But then he hesitates, the sense-memory of Liam’s bright clean scent on his tongue tugging at him, and after a second he pivots just enough that he can look back at Liam as he adds, “Hey. Good—good game tonight.”

Liam blinks, apparently taken aback. He spends a few seconds just staring with that same surprised expression on his face, and then a grin blooms over his face, wide and with nothing forced about it.

“Thanks. I’m, um,” he suddenly stops, his expression spasming a bit, and then he apparently steels himself as he straightens up and says, firmly, “I’m glad you made it.”

He colors some after he’s said it—Theo can see it even in the washed-out lighting of the parking lot—but he also gives Theo a flicker of a smile, before he pulls his lips between his teeth, and bites down. Theo finds himself caught by the way the edges of Liam’s mouth goes pale, his teeth pressing the blood out of his skin.

“Me too,” he finds himself saying— _admitting_ —and then he can’t help but pull his own lips between his teeth.

They stare at each other for a few seconds longer, and then Liam abruptly says, “Right. Right, well,” before he takes a half-step back, and gives an awkward wave, and pivots on his upraised heel as he starts for his SUV. “Night, Theo.”

“Night, Liam,” Theo murmurs, his eyes on the tight clench of Liam’s shoulders, and he doesn’t move until another group of people exits the restaurant, briefly cutting off his view, and he comes back to himself, blinking.

“No problem,” he tells a woman as she apologizes for nearly running into him, and then he glances back out at the space where Liam had been, but isn’t, before finally turning around, and heading for his own truck.

\---

There are, Theo is beginning to realize, some pretty serious downsides to Mason and Corey no longer being perpetually afraid of him.

“I said no,” he snaps, he and Mason stood nearly toe-to-toe in the vacation home’s living room later that night. A few feet away and sprawled back on the couch, Corey huffs out a loud, frustrated sigh and drops his head back against the cushions, his crossed arms crossing further. “Absolutely not.”

“Theo—” Mason starts, ghost-blue light threading its way into his irises, but Theo just slices a hand through the air, cutting him off.

“ _No_ , Mason. It’s too dangerous.” The pressure at the base of his skull is starting to become an ache, and bad enough that Theo has to briefly squint his eyes shut and shake his head to try and relieve some of it.

“ _I’m_ too dangerous!” Mason counters shrilly, his patience—like Theo’s—apparently shot. “You can dress it up in all the motivational interpretations that you like, but that doesn’t change the fact that I lost control and nearly _killed you—_ ”

This time it’s Theo who tries, “ _Mason_ ,” and gets talked over.

“—and I’m _not going back_ until I know that I can be stopped, if needed!” Mason glares at him once he’s done, his irises fully pale-blue now. Theo grits his jaw, and tries to take comfort in the fact that the sight only causes the barest frizzle of adrenaline to bolt up his spine.

Biting off a harsh noise, Theo jerks his gaze away, and winds up looking at Corey. But: “Don’t look at me,” Corey tells him mercilessly. “I’ve been having this argument with him for the last two _days_ already, not just the last two hours.”

Theo opens his mouth to make a smart comment back, his irritation flaring and made worse by the pain now starting to spread out from the top of his spine, but Mason beats him to it. “ _Stop it_. Both of you, stop treating me like I’m acting like some kind of child,” he snarls, and Theo feels his jaw clench, Corey’s gaze skittering guiltily away. “I’m not being unreasonable and _you know it_.”

“No one said you were,” Theo retorts, and then, when Mason’s mouth opens to no doubt argue, he repeats, “ _No one said you were_. But the only person you’ve tried to hurt is _me_ , and that’s a special circumstance, and _you_ know _that_.”

Mason doesn’t agree, but he also doesn’t deny it. Instead he clenches his jaw just as hard as Theo is clenching his own and reminds him, “ _You_ were the one who said that I’m going to be stronger than everyone else, and if that’s—”

“I _said_ ,” Theo interrupts him pointedly, “you would be stronger than everyone _but Scott_. And,” he presses even more forcefully, “I said _going to be_. As in, you aren’t yet. As in, having Corey—who only found out that he even _has_ any offensive capabilities a few weeks ago—try a completely untested ability on you for a completely _hypothetical_ risk is _too dangerous_.”

A sharp, stabbing pain flares out from the base of Theo’s skull as Mason continues to glare at him, unmoved, and Theo can’t ignore it anymore; he bites off a snarl.

“God _damn it_ , Mason— _stop that_ ,” he orders, one hand rising to dig into the center of the stabbing ache.

 _That_ throws Mason. He blinks several surprised times, the pale-blue of the shift disappearing to leave the color of his human eyes behind, and his mouth drops open in a soft _O_ as he seems to realize. “Sorry,” he stutters. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine,” Theo tells him as the pain immediately starts to fade, and then repeats, “I said _it’s fine_ ,” when Mason goes to apologize again. Beside them on the couch the clench of Corey’s shoulders relaxes some, too, his previously-digging fingertips sliding flat against his biceps instead.

Mason just continues to stare at him, horrified and—and _terrified_. Even if Theo couldn’t sense Mason’s fear tucked up tight against the base of his skull—awareness filtering back in as the pain fades back to its more steady pressure—he’d be able to _see_ it, raw and all over Mason’s cracked-open expression. Groaning, Theo covers his face with his hands and wheels away from both him and Corey, trying to think.

Finally he drops his hands, and tilts his head to look at Corey. “You’re not trying it on him,” he states, flat and final and with no room for argument.

“I don’t _want_ to try it on him!” Corey shoots back shrilly, and over Mason immediately trying to protest. “I don’t want to try it on _anyone!_ ”

“Then I’m not—!” Mason starts to yell, his voice cracking and the desperation shining through.

“I _know!_ ” Theo shouts, cutting them both off. “I know,” he repeats more quietly, once both Mason and Corey have fallen into a stunned silence. He blows out a frustrated breath, and turns so that he’s facing both of them again. “If we’re in agreement that you’re not risking trying it on him,” he says to Corey, “and _you’re_ not going to leave until he demonstrates he can do it,” he says to Mason, “then there’s really only one option.”

He exhales out roughly again, and looks back at Corey.

“Congratulations,” he tells him. “You get to try it on me.”

Immediately they both try to protest.

“No. No _way_ ,” Corey denies hotly. “We’ve already almost killed you _once_ , I don’t actually _want my turn_ at it. Just convince him that we don’t—!”

“You said _I’m stronger_ ,” Mason tries, a little hysterically. “You said with the Beast’s abilities—”

“ _Enough!_ ” Theo yells, cutting them both off. He looks back and forth between them after they’ve both snapped their mouths shut. “Scott and Argent and the others are going after Monroe in just over twenty-four hours. You want to make coming back as easy as possible, you do it right _after_ they’ve got her and her people, just like we discussed. We don’t have _time_ for this.”

Reaching down, Theo gets ahold of the center of Corey’s shirt and hauls him to his feet. Corey staggers some, but Theo doesn’t release him until he steadies, and then he lets go of Corey’s shirt to spread his arms wide.

“C’mon, Corey,” he orders harshly. “Do it.”

“You don’t even know what _it_ is!” Corey counters shrilly, sounding just as hysterical as Mason now and glancing at Mason pleadingly. “Mason, tell him we don’t have to do this. Let’s just go _home_ , you’ll be—”

“Theo, c’mon, let him try it on _me_ , I’m the one who—” Mason tries, taking a half-step forward and with his hands up and patting desperately at the air between them.

Theo just ignores him, and focuses on Corey. “Do it, Corey. You want to go home? You want _Mason_ to be able to go home? Then _do i—_ ”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish; Corey’s face suddenly scrunches up like he’s in pain, and he cocks a suddenly wraith-like hand back before— _before_ —

Before driving it right into Theo’s chest, and taking hold of his heart.

Theo chokes on a sudden mouthful of blood, his hands coming up automatically to clutch at Corey’s forearm. Or at least the half of it that isn’t buried in his chest, and Theo stares into Corey’s eyes, barely able to breathe and with panic starting to overtake every other thought in his head because— _because_ —

Because he’d gotten _out_ , hadn’t he? Because he’d been _pulled out_ , rescued from the skinwalker prison by Liam, freed from the neverending cycle of death-and-rebirth, of the cold, dark halls of Beacon Hills Memorial, of the closed-in coffin of the morgue drawer.

Of Tara—of his _sister_ —reaching into his chest to reclaim her stolen heart.

“No, please,” Theo finds himself begging, his eyes locked on Corey’s—on _Corey’s?_ —face as he feels the bands of Corey’s—of _Corey’s?_ —fingers locked tight around his heart, except— _except_ —

He blinks, and it’s Tara. He blinks, and it’s Corey.

“No,” Theo denies desperately. “No, _no_ ,” because what if he _hadn’t_ gotten out? What if he hadn’t been pulled out, what if he hadn’t been rescued from the skinwalker prison by Liam? What if he _hadn’t_ been freed from the neverending cycle of death-and-rebirth, what if it’d just _shifted_ , what if he’d only _thought_ he’d been freed from the cold, dark halls of Beacon Hills Memorial, of the closed-in cage of the morgue drawer?

What if he only _thought_ he’d been rescued from Tara—from his _sister_ —reaching into his chest to reclaim her stolen heart?

 _Theo_ , he can hear her calling, low and sing-songing and unstoppable as she stalks him through the halls. _Theo_ , he can hear her whispering as she catches him, as she raises one hand, and cocks it back, and drives it into his chest. _Theo_ , he can hear. _Theo, Theo—_

“Theo!” Someone yells.

Theo’s eyes snap open.

The sight that greets him isn’t claustrophobic metal top of the morgue drawer, but the high, arched ceiling of the vacation home that Mason and Corey had been squatting in. It’s Corey’s and Mason’s faces, too-close and leaned over him, their expressions raw and terrified and staring down at him in desperation, their hands on his shoulders and on his hips but none of them on— _in_ —his chest.

Theo lets out a shaky breath.

“Fuck, _fuck_ ,” Corey gasps out, and half-collapses over Theo as he wails, “Oh my _god_ , jesus _christ,_ I thought I’d—” He cuts himself off, his hands clenching around fistfuls of Theo’s shirt.

Mason for his part falls back on his heels and buries his face in his hands. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he mumbles into his palms.

Theo just concentrates on breathing in, and out, for a few more unsteady times—feeling the weight of Corey on his chest rise and fall with him, Corey still half-folded over him—as he stares up at the ceiling. At the high, _white_ ceiling, not the low, _metal_ ceiling. He closes his eyes.

“What happened?” He asks, his voice barely more than a rasp and his throat feeling raw, and shredded.

Corey doesn’t answer, but Mason says, “It looked like a panic attack, maybe,” quietly. Theo opens his eyes back up, and tilts his head—still on the ground—to look at him. Mason isn’t looking at him, though; he’d dropped his hands away from his face and is twisting his fingers together, the _scrape_ of nail-against-nail sounding thunderously loud in Theo’s ears. “You kept, um. You kept—”

“You kept begging me to _stop_ , you fucker!” Corey interrupts, shouting it as he straightens up off of Theo’s chest before punching him _hard_ in the shoulder; Theo bites off a surprised, pained protest and flails up a hand to catch Corey’s fist before he can hit him again.

“No, he didn’t,” Mason disagrees quietly, and both Corey and Theo freeze. Mason’s expression spasms when Theo looks over at him and he hesitates before correcting, “You kept…You kept begging _Tara_ to stop.”

Theo stares at him for a few stunned, horrified seconds, his fingers spasming around Corey’s, and then he drops them and lets his head thump back with a quiet, heartfelt, “ _Fuck_.”

“You _asshole_ ,” Corey shrills, and hits him again, though less forcefully. Theo grits his teeth and catches Corey’s hands again, though he almost immediately loses hold of them when Corey yanks them free and goes to hit him again as he yells, “You arrogant, selfish _asshole!_ What is _wrong_ with you, _why_ would you _make me do that to yo—!_ ”

“I didn’t know!” Theo yells back, finally managing to catch Corey’s flailing hands again, and this time securely enough that Corey can’t jerk them free. “I didn’t know, I didn’t _think_ …”

He trails off, swallowing, and this time when Corey yanks at his hands he lets them go. Corey doesn’t hit him again, though, just covers his own face with his hands. It’s then that Theo realizes, for the first time, that Corey’s right hand is covered up to the wrist with blood. With _his_ blood, Theo realizes, and feels his stomach roll and panic spike helplessly through him.

Almost immediately it stops, though, abrupt and a little jarring like someone had reached inside his head—Theo shudders reflexively at the thought—and grabbed hold of it. Tipping his head sideways, he looks back at Mason, whose brow is furrowed and whose bottom lip is between his teeth.

“I thought I’d _killed you_. Why would you do that to me, I thought _I’d—_ ” Corey is mumbling over and over again on his other side, and Theo squeezes his eyes shut, guilt bursting out from the core of himself—from his sister’s heart, caged inside his own ribs—and forces himself to roll over, onto his side and then onto his elbow so that he can reach for one of Corey’s covering hands.

He gets the bloody one, but ignores that, just keeps pressing his fingertips into the pulse point at Corey’s wrist and pulling, and pulling, until Corey drops his other hand and looks at him. “I’m _sorry_ ,” he tells Corey once Corey does. “I’m sorry, Corey.”

Corey stares at him for a few seconds, that same raw expression on his face, and then he makes a harsh, high sound and buries his face in his bent knees instead, his one wrist still in Theo’s grasp. Theo sags some on his bracing elbow as guilt rushes through him again, his gaze still fixed on the top of Corey’s head as he tries to think of _something_ , of _anything_ , to say.

But it’s Mason who winds up speaking instead. “Is that…?” He starts, low and hesitant and stopping when Theo turns his head over his shoulder to look at him. After a second he swallows, and tries again. “Is that what happened to you when…?”

Theo hesitates. And then he glances back at the top of Corey’s still-hidden face, and closes his eyes. “Yes,” he tells Mason, and without looking back, “and no,” he says, and then he swallows, and tells him; tells them both.

Mason and Corey are both quiet once he’s done. Corey had raised his head, partway through Theo’s story—his _confession_ , of sorts—to stare at him in open-mouthed horror, Theo eventually letting go of his wrist to haul himself into a sitting position, his arms wrapped around his bent legs. Theo lets the silence reign, and this time _he’s_ the one who hides _his_ face in his knees, his eyes hot and his chest feeling weirdly hollow and the sense-pressure at the base of his skull a roiling mass of conflicted _somethings_ , and barely any of it his own.

Finally he tells Corey again, quiet and low and _sincere_ , “I’m sorry. If I’d known what you were—if I’d known, I never would have…”

But Mason cuts him off, surprisingly. “I shouldn’t have insisted. I shouldn’t have—that wasn’t fair of me, to either of you.”

Theo can’t help looking up at him, and then at Corey, who looks back in equal surprise, his gaze flicking from Mason to Theo when he catches Theo’s attention.

“I’m sorry too, I guess,” he says, and then his face splits in a wide, watery grin. “Not for _this_ fiasco, this was _all_ you two, but I’m sure I’ve something I need to—need to apologize for.”

His attempt at humor cracks wide open as he says the last bit, his gaze flicking once more from Theo back to Mason. As he does Theo remembers that first night, at spitting at him, _what’d you do, knock him out and spirit him away in the middle of the night?,_ and he blinks, and jerks his gaze away from them, feeling suddenly voyeuristic as Mason smiles shakily back at Corey and shakes his head once in a simple, gentle dismissal; _no apology needed_.

The silence stretches for a little longer, and then suddenly Mason sucks in a deep, bracing breath; both Corey’s and Theo’s attention immediately snap to him. “Well,” he says, and gives another of those shaky smiles. “Well. Maybe now that we’ve all made—all made our own mistakes, that means we can—we can go home now.” He bites his lip, and looks at each of them individually for a long, stretched second. “We can—we can all go home.”

Behind him and out of the corner of his eye, Theo can see Corey nod. Theo just stares at Mason a little longer, and Mason just stares back, expression wide and open and _hopeful_ , and Theo…

After another half-second of hesitation, Theo nods, too.

\---

Mason’s words stick with him.

 _Home_ , he just keeps thinking. _Maybe now that we’ve all made our own mistakes, we can go home._

He thinks it while watching Argent at the station the next day when Argent’s attention is elsewhere, his fingers playing over and over the bracelet around his wrist. He thinks it as he accepts a cup of coffee from the Sheriff, murmuring a quiet thanks and smiling softly back when the Sheriff flashes him an absent, warm smile. He thinks it while responding to a sly-mouthed comment from Derek, Scott exclaiming in mock-outrage and pelting them both with the crumpled-up sheets of notebook paper on which he’d been considering and rejecting and refining his notes.

He thinks it while taking advantage of the momentary calm before the proverbial storm—the last twelve hours before Argent’s and the Sheriff’s and Agent McCall’s people would move to take Monroe and her followers—to meet Liam at the school library with a bag of take-out in hand after classes wrap for the day, Liam with his nose buried in his laptop hustling to finish his paper on early European history. Liam blinks at him when he stops in front of the table he’d claimed with his massive sprawl of notes and cracked-open reference books, and then he grins, wide and crinkle-eyed.

 _Home_ , Theo thinks, as he drops the bag of food directly on top of Liam’s keyboard specifically for the way that it makes him squawk in outrage. _Maybe we can go home._

Last night he’d huddled around the kitchen island in the vacation home with Corey and Mason, and he’d poked and prodded at the warmed-up pasta in the bowl that Mason had handed him, and he’d said, _I’m going to have to tell them._ Corey had been freshly showered—his right hand and wrist still a fading red, but from his scrubbing at it, and not Theo’s blood—and Theo had changed out his ruined shirt for the clean one Mason had found. _Argent and Scott and the others,_ he’d clarified, when Mason and Corey had looked at him in confusion. _I’m going to have to tell them about the bracelet_.

“I can’t believe it’s almost over,” Liam says, jolting Theo back into the high school library and out of the memory of the vacation home’s kitchen. “It doesn’t seem real.”

Theo stares down at him as Liam starts to open the bag, immediately freezes when it crinkles loudly, and then looks sneakily around before apparently being satisfied by the lack of outraged yells from any of the staff down on the first floor, and finishes opening it. Last night Corey had bitten his lip, and rubbed his left hand unconsciously over his right wrist, and said, _You sure you want to risk it? You’ve gotten away with it this long, we could—_

 _You’re not that good of liars_ , Theo had cut him off, not unkindly, and had grinned softly at Corey’s acknowledging wince.

“Yeah, well,” Theo says, today and in the library and not last night and in the vacation home. “It’ll be _very_ real tomorrow.”

“Hmm,” Liam hums, his hands slowing in their process of unpacking the food that Theo had brought as he looks back up. “What do you think happens next? If it works, I mean.”

 _How do you think they’ll react?_ Mason had asked quietly. _I mean, what do you think_ —he hadn’t said ‘Argent,’ but he hadn’t needed to— _they’ll do when they find out?_

“I don’t know,” Theo tells Liam, just like he’d told Mason last night, and finally takes a seat and accepts the wrapped sandwich that Liam offers him.

 _Well, whatever happens_ , Mason had replied, his shoulders going back and his spine straightening up, and it should have been hilarious given Mason’s relative height, but it—hadn’t been. _You know that we’re, that we’re_ —here he’d faltered, and looked at Corey, but only for a moment; only until Corey had nodded firmly back— _we’re with you_.

And Theo had stared at him, and then at Corey, and then he’d swallowed, and cleared his throat, and instead of saying _I know_ —even though he did, somehow, couldn’t _not_ know even if he’d wanted to, not with the sense of both of them tucked up tight at the base of his skull—he’d forced a wobbly smile onto his face, and said, _And isn’t that just an unexpected twist ending_.

Corey and Mason had both laughed, and grinned shakily back, but Mason’s irises had been ghost-blue. Just for a moment; just for a blink.

“Well, whatever happens,” Liam says, and Theo has to blink and shake his head a little to clear the odd sense of déjà-vu, Liam today echoing Mason last night, “I guess we’ll encounter that wooden horse when we come to it.” He pauses, and grins widely as he stares avidly at Theo for his reaction. “Get it? Because of—” He starts to explain, and then cuts off with a startled sound and an immediate cackle because Theo had already rolled his eyes and balled up a paper napkin to throw at him.

 _Maybe now that we’ve all made our own mistakes_ , Theo thinks, watching him from under a ducked brow as they both settle back down to eat, _we can go home_.

He gets to the vacation home later that night with the handles of a bottle of bleach and a separate bottle of cleaning fluid threaded through his fingers, and a plastic bag full of rags and sponges hanging from his opposite wrist. He can’t see or hear Mason or Corey anywhere—can’t smell them, either, not with the harsh burn of chemicals in his nose—but he can _feel_ them somewhere close by, the steady pressure at the base of his skull a warm weight. Setting the bottles down on the island in the kitchen and shaking the bag off his wrist next to them, Theo pivots around to turn and go poke through the house for them, and stops dead.

“You know, in hindsight,” Argent tells him from the doorway, and holds up Theo’s bracelet in one hand, “the mistake I made with this is obvious.”

Theo feels his eyes widen and his hands start to come reflexively up as he pleads, “Argent, _wait—_ ” but it’s too late; Argent had already dropped the bracelet and raised his opposite arm, the gun in his hand glinting dully in the overhead lights in the split second before he fires.

The shot catches Theo in the stomach and sends him colliding back against the island with a choked, pained sound. At the back of his skull he can feel the pressure there _flare_ , but he doesn’t have time to focus on it; as the wolfsbane in the bullet starts to spread and his knees start to collapse out from underneath him, Argent is suddenly _there_ and dragging him back upright, and pinning him half-bent back over the island.

“All these weeks,” Argent continues, almost conversationally as he holds Theo still, seemingly heedless of Theo’s wet gasps or helpless convulsions, “I _thought_ you were being oddly accommodating of your circumstances.”

“Argent, please,” Theo rasps, weak and with blood flecking his lips as he does.

“The exhaustion, the sleeplessness,” Argent says, talking over him. “Was that story about the skinwalker prison and your sister even true?” Argent doesn’t give him a chance to answer, just smiles—the curve of it not going anywhere near his eyes—and concludes, “You sure as shit convinced _Liam_ , anyway.”

“ _Argent_ ,” Theo begs, his vision starting to tunnel, but Argent just bends him harder back over the counter.

“Or you _had_ , anyway,” he tells him, his tone gone biting, “until last night. He just couldn’t get over you knowing that story about Mason and Corey. Came over to talk to Scott about it, and everything.”

His eyes flick to the side, to the cleaning supplies that Theo had brought so that he could help Mason and Corey scrub down the house, erase all traces of their time there.

“That for them?” Argent asks, his tone back to being conversational. “For Mason and Corey?”

Shock causes Theo to freeze, even with the agony radiating out from his ruined and poisoned stomach; even with Argent’s hand around his neck. “What?” He breathes. “You think I…?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Argent answers, voice gone low and dangerous. “You and I both know you’ve got a documented history of killing your own kind.”

“No!” Theo protests helplessly, gasping and still weak but as forceful as he can make it. “No, I didn’t. I _didn’t_. Argent, I can, I can _explain—_ ”

“I’m sure you could,” Argent agrees, cutting him off. “That’s the problem, Theo,” he adds, almost sympathetically. “You always can.”

All at once he releases his hold on Theo and takes a step back, and Theo crumples immediately to the floor at his feet. Crying out as the move jars his ruined stomach, Theo has to spend a few agonizing seconds curled in on himself riding out the sudden explosion of pain, and by the time he manages to force himself to relax just enough that he can look, panting, up at Argent, Argent is looking down at him, his gun back in his hand.

“Damn it, Theo. I really thought… I was really starting to believe…” He says, and with all the anger drained away from his expression to leave an exhausted sort of disappointment behind. He sighs, and shakes his head. “Goodbye, Theo,” he murmurs quietly, and raises his gun.

And then all at once he freezes, before convulsing once.

Theo stares, open-mouthed and blank-minded but with his better sense trying to override his panicked adrenaline, and then all at once he gets it. “Corey,” he says, his tone still scrubbed clean with his shock but with the barest threads of alarm starting to work their way into it. “Corey, _no_.”

Theo can’t really see him past the bulk of Argent’s body but he doesn’t _need_ to. He can see the unnatural way that Argent is standing, up on his toes and obviously in agony, and more than that: he can feel the twisted-up sense of Corey at the base of his skull, desperate and terrified but so very _determined_ past all of that.

“Drop the gun,” he orders Argent, his voice shaking. “Drop it!”

“Corey, stop!” Theo yells as best as he can as he tries to force himself up onto his knees. He barely notices Mason scrambling down beside him, Mason’s hands going to Theo’s shoulders and arm to try and steady him. “You don’t have enough control over your abilities, you’re going to kill him!”

Corey flicks his eyes to Theo’s in a desperate glance. “ _He’s_ going to kill _you!_ ”

“Corey!” Theo yells again, his attention snapping to Argent’s clenched-jaw face and the blood starting to leak out of the corners of his mouth as Argent convulses again, Corey’s hand in his chest—Corey’s hand around his _heart_ —causing his eyes to start to roll back, his breathing to start to stutter, and rasp.

“Drop the gun, Argent!” Corey yells again, ignoring him to look back at Argent, his voice cracking halfway through and his fingers—Theo can tell from the way Argent chokes—spasming.

“ _Corey!_ ” Theo shouts, halfway up onto his knees now and trying to struggle the rest of the way up, Mason trying to argue with him and pull him back down, just as Corey yells, more begging than ordering, now: “Argent, _drop the—_ ”

And then a savage roar splits the air, fierce and ear-shattering and instantly overwhelming every other thought and sound and action.

By the time Theo can finally blink open his squeezed shut eyes in the total silence that falls some unidentified time later, he and Mason and Corey and Argent are all crumpled on the floor, Argent on his back and coughing and Corey curled in on himself beside him with his hands over his ears. By Theo’s hip, Mason is half-curled _over_ Theo, his teeth gritted and his tightly-shut eyes leaking pale-blue light. Theo stares up at him for a second, and then his attention snaps to the side, towards the doorway.

Scott’s eyes are still blazing red, the sense of him and his heaving shoulders still _huge_ and overwhelming. But it’s not Scott that keeps Theo’s attention.

“Liam,” he breathes unsteadily, his eyes drawn instantly and helplessly to Liam stood just off Scott’s shoulder, raw shock all over his face.

And then Theo cries out, agony bursting out from his ruined stomach, as he’s suddenly dragged forcefully backwards. The motion stops almost as soon as it’d started and he gasps up at the ceiling as he struggles to reclaim his scattered thoughts, and then he forces his tunneling, color-streaked vision back down and to the side to see Mason now stood in front of him, his arms spread wide and his fingers claw-tipped and the Beast’s signature shift rising under his skin. As Theo watches Corey scrambles up and away from Argent and retreats to stand just behind Mason’s right shoulder, though he keeps glancing, helplessly and with his desperation and terror still all over his face, back at Theo.

“Mason. Corey,” Scott says blankly, shock apparently shaking loose the shift; his eyes fade back to their human color as he blinks. They flick down to Theo laid out on the floor, before flicking back up to Mason, still stunned. “I don’t… I don’t under—”

He cuts off as Argent suddenly groans, and forces himself over onto his hands and knees before starting to push himself shakily upright. Almost immediately Argent wobbles, and Scott darts forward to brace his shoulder underneath one of Argent’s arms.

But the movement brings him too close, apparently: Mason snarls, and Theo can see Scott—and Liam behind him—startle backwards, Scott half-dragging Argent with him as he takes a reflexive half-step back.

Gritting his teeth and bracing himself, Theo forces _himself_ up and over onto his hands and knees. “Mason,” he tries, gasping it out as the movement jars his ruined stomach and sends his heart pumping his wolfsbane-poisoned blood faster through his veins. “Mason, stop.”

“Mason,” Scott tries, Argent still slung halfway over his shoulder and Liam behind him still staring in open-mouthed, silent shock, but Mason cuts him off.

“Get _back_ ,” he orders, his mouthful of fangs distorting the words and the sense of him at the back of Theo’s skull pulsing harshly.

“ _Mason_ ,” Theo rasps, and then nearly collapses onto his face as his shaking arms give out; Corey makes a soft, startled noise and ducks down to catch him at the last moment.

Mason glances back at them, though he keeps his shoulders, his body, positioned firmly forward. His eyes are blazing. “He tried to _kill you_ ,” he spits out.

“You tried to kill me like a week ago,” Theo reminds him, gasping and wishing even as he says it that he didn’t have to, but. “It’s me, remember?” He adds, more gently as Mason’s heaving shoulders start to slow, the fury starting to drain away from his face to be replaced by horror. “Special circumstance.”

Mason stares at him for a little longer and then he blinks, and exhales out a shaky breath, and the shift falls abruptly away from his body and the sense of him like a cut curtain dropping to the floor. He takes several steps back after, closer to Corey and Theo—and farther away from Scott and Argent and Liam—and swallows, once, as Corey reaches up with his free hand to tangle it in the bottom of his shirt’s hem, Corey’s other arm still around Theo’s shoulders.

An immediate, strained silence falls as they all stare at each other, Scott and Argent and Liam on one side of the room and Corey and Mason and Theo on the other. No one seems to want to move—too afraid of reigniting the stalemate, maybe—but after another few, crawling seconds have dragged themselves by, it suddenly doesn’t matter; Argent groans quietly and curls his shoulders in a little around the center of himself—around his abused heart—and Theo suddenly chokes on his latest inhale and clutches spastically at Corey’s bracing arm as the wolfsbane in his blood apparently reaches something vital and _pain_ explodes outward through his limbs.

“Theo!” Corey and Mason both gasp, nearly in unison, just as Scott asks, “Chris, are you—?”

“I’m fine,” Theo hears Argent answer, firmly if through gritted teeth.

“Theo’s not,” Corey snaps back, Theo watching as Corey turns to glare out at Scott and Argent.

Another uncomfortable silence falls, and then Scott blows out a huge, bracing breath. “Okay,” he announces firmly. “Okay. First things first.”

\---

Scott’s _first things first_ apparently involves healing Theo of his wolfsbane poisoning so they can all talk without risking his untimely death, but Scott’s good intentions are immediately complicated by the fact that Mason won’t—likely _can’t_ —let him or Argent or even Liam get close enough to Theo to do anything about it.

It’s Argent who finally lays a restraining hand on Scott’s tense, distressed arm after an unproductive five minutes of Argent, and then Scott, and even Liam trying and failing to approach, and makes steady eye-contact with Corey, one of his wolfsbane bullets in his palm. Corey catches on immediately and nods, snatching the bullet out of the air when Argent tosses it, and then catching the lighter Argent throws next. Theo drags his gaze away from Mason—still stood protectively in front of him and Corey—and to Corey as Corey crouches over him, and smiles shakily at him as Corey’s eyes pinball nervously between the bullet he’s pulling apart and the festering wound in Theo’s stomach and Scott and Argent and Liam across the room.

It leaves another strained silence to fill as Corey works, and Theo finds himself infinitely grateful when Argent does, in fact, fill it; it covers up to some extent the click of the lighter, the quiet _whoosh_ as Corey lights the pieces of wolfsbane that he’d tipped out of Argent’s deconstructed bullet.

“What are you even doing here?” He demands, looking at Scott. He’d managed to push himself to his own two feet, and was staying there unassisted, though he still looks pale and shaky; Corey’s attack may not have done him any _permanent_ physical damage, but Theo knows from experience that the act of getting someone’s wraithlike hand shoved through your sternum created its own lingering complications.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Scott shoots back, but almost immediately he exhales out roughly, and Theo glances at him just in time to see him look briefly towards Mason and Corey and Theo himself as he adds, more quietly, “But I think maybe I don’t have to, anymore.”

Theo’s attention is pulled back to Corey the next instant, though, as Corey leans a little more fully over him and asks quietly, “Ready?”

Theo gives a single, jerky nod, but he’s also helplessly grateful when Mason suddenly abandons his guarding stance above them and instead kneels down next to Theo’s head to get his hands around either side of Theo’s face. He starts siphoning Theo’s pain and keeps doing it past the initial spike of agony as Corey gathers up the wolfsbane ashes and tips them into the wound on Theo’s stomach, holding Theo’s head steady as Theo bites off a cry and convulses.

Theo’s just started to relax back down—his clenching muscles starting to release and his healing starting to kick in to replace his dying cells—when he hears Liam murmur, “You lied tonight.” Theo freezes, helplessly, and looks over at Liam, but Liam isn’t looking at him; he’s looking at Argent. Answering Argent’s question, Theo realizes. “You lied about working on something with Scott’s dad, and you asked those weird questions last night about Theo when I came over to talk to Scott, and we…and _I_ …”

“We followed you,” Scott takes over, gently, his eyes on Liam’s face. But Theo barely notices, because Liam’s attention had slowly drifted from Argent over to Theo as he’d spoken, and Theo finds himself staring helplessly back. “After Liam stopped by the station and realized you weren’t with my dad, he came to me, and we went looking for you, and then when we couldn’t find you, we—we followed you here.”

“Yeah, well,” Corey suddenly interrupts. “Your timing sucks.”

Theo’s eyes snap to his and Corey gives him a watery smile, before abruptly groaning and collapsing onto his hip—his side becoming a warm, firm weight against Theo’s ribs—as he covers his face with his hands. Above Theo, Mason finishes siphoning the last of Theo’s pain, but doesn’t bother sitting back, or removing his hands.

Across the room, Scott and Argent and Liam are looking at them strangely. “I don’t,” Scott starts, after a second of hesitation. “Our timing…?”

“We were coming home,” Mason answers, and then laughs without humor. “Tomorrow. Or, or today, I guess. But we were—” He cuts himself, his eyes squeezing shut and his fingers spasming around Theo’s face.

“Oh,” Scott says, in the heavy, awkward silence that falls. “Oh, well.”

He stops, the absolute last traces of _alpha_ —true or otherwise—falling away from him to leave just _Scott_ behind. He spends a few seconds chewing on his lip, and then he glances around at Mason, at Argent, at Liam over his shoulder and then at Corey, and finally at Theo, before finally saying:

“Maybe we could…start at the beginning?”

\---

“It started on the full moon right before we left,” Corey says ten minutes later, now half-perched on the couch in the vacation home’s living room, Theo’s head by his hip. He tugs his sleeves down over his hands as he says it, and Theo feels his heart—his _sister’s_ heart—twist in his chest as he recognizes the nervous tic.

“No, it didn’t,” Mason disagrees, not unkindly. He smiles shakily at Corey when Corey looks over at him, and presses a little more fully back against Theo’s bent knees against his ribs, before refocusing on Scott and Argent and Liam across the room. “It’d—it’d been going on for a while. We just—didn’t know what _it_ was, until then.”

And then he takes a deep breath, and explains.

“Oh, _wow_ ,” Scott breathes some time later, his eyes roving over Mason’s face and hands and the stretches of his exposed skin; over the Beast’s shift pushed through the prism of Mason’s containing flesh and bones and blood.

Behind him, Liam’s mouth has dropped open again and Argent’s eyes have gone narrow, but there’s no threat to the sense of him; just a clinical sort of curiosity. Theo flicks his attention from the cluster of them back to Mason as Mason drops the shift and takes the few steps back necessary so that he can drop back onto the couch, his fingers twisting uncertainly together in his lap as he tries, and fails, not to keep glancing at Scott and Argent and Liam for their reactions.

“It makes sense,” Argent finally murmurs, his gaze dropping to Theo’s. “The changes the Dread Doctors’ made to Mason’s body were done before the Beast’s possession, so they survived its exorcising.”

It’s half a question, and Theo recognizes it as such; he nods, tightly. Argent watches him for a half-second longer, and then looks away.

Looks away because _Liam_ is suddenly speaking, and for only the second time all night. “But why did you _run?_ ” He demands, his voice cracking halfway through with the force of his desperation. “Why would you—?”

“Maybe I was worried,” Corey interrupts, his tone gone flinty, and cold, “that _someone_ would shoot first, and ask questions later.”

Argent’s jaw clenches as he looks steadily back at Corey, but he doesn’t try to defend himself. Grimacing, Theo shifts just enough that he can reach up and dig the knuckles of one of his hands lightly into Corey’s thigh above him as he murmurs _hey_ ; Corey blinks, abruptly, and glances down at him, and then smiles shakily as their eyes meet. The sense of aggression and accusation falls away from him, and he burrows back a little more deeply into the couch. The movement leaves the warmth of his thigh pressed along the back of Theo’s neck, up across the base of his skull, the pressure of it soothing against the steadily-fading headache Theo can still feel pounding away at his temples.

“Okay,” Scott says gamely after another few dragging seconds. “Okay, well. That still doesn’t… I still don’t understand exactly how…”

He’s looking at Theo as he says it; at Theo, and the places where he and Corey and Mason are pressed tightly together. Squeezing his eyes briefly shut, Theo starts to struggle upright, feeling too strange lying on his side with all the vulnerable parts of himself exposed. Corey and Mason both make soft, startled noises in response, but move instantly to help him; Theo can feel it when Mason starts to pull the low, lingering pain away from Theo’s veins and into himself, too.

“Mason and Corey and I share an ancestor,” Theo picks up the explanation, giving Scott the same answer that he’d given Corey all those weeks ago. “The Doctors used—” He has to stop, and suck in a few bracing, shallow breaths as the change in position causes his head to briefly dip, and roil, with vertigo, “—they used the same donor werewolf DNA to create all of us.”

“‘ _Donor_ ,’” Argent snorts, low and skeptical. Theo winces.

“It creates a—a connection,” he continues, pushing past Argent’s comment, and waves a hand vaguely by the base of his skull. “I followed it to them.”

“Getting into the operating theater,” Argent realizes. “The day you suddenly decided to reveal the existence of the map and compass.” His eyes are appraising as he looks back at Theo, and Theo has to look away.

He’s about to respond, to continue his explanation, but he’s beaten to it.

“You knew,” Liam accuses, and Theo’s eyes snap to his as Liam takes a half-step forward, his eyes flecking with gold. “You knew _the whole time_. You knew they were alive, you knew where they _were_ , and you never—!”

“It wasn’t his fault!” Corey cuts in, and leaning forward just enough that—that Theo is half-hidden behind the breadth of his shoulders, Theo realizes, and feels something twist in his chest. Corey glances back at him, and gives him a wobbly, guilty smile. “I—I blackmailed him,” he admits. He sucks in a deep breath, and explains, “That first night, I told him that—that if he told you, or anyone, about us, or where we were, that I’d—I’d…”

“Tell _you_ that Theo could get out of the bracelet,” Mason finishes for him, and looking steadily at Argent.

Corey flinches, and in doing so turns just enough that the back of his shoulder presses into the side of Theo’s chest. Theo presses forward into him in return, and feels something wound tight around his own spine start to relax when Corey shudders, some, and slumps back into the touch.

He stiffens right back up, though, when he realizes that Scott and Argent and Liam are all watching them closely, Scott’s and Liam’s brows furrowed and Argent’s expression narrow-eyed and thoughtful.

Clearing his throat and quirking a quick, apologetic smile at Corey when Corey stiffens reflexively in return, Theo touches his tongue to his bottom lip, and then picks his explanation back up.

“Mason was dying when I found them, the first time.” Liam flinches, full and bodily. Theo looks briefly at him, but jerks his eyes away when Liam’s catches him and his jaw clenches. “I managed to stabilize his condition the first night, and then used the supplies—” here, he looks at Argent, an admission, “—that I took from the operating theater to create a treatment that would allow him to adjust to the Beast’s abilities.”

“To become the Beast,” Argent summarizes.

“The Beast is dead,” Theo disagrees, his tone gone hard. He finds himself glaring at Argent as he says it, and only fully realizes what he’s doing when Argent’s eyebrows climb, just slightly. Blinking, Theo swallows once, and then again, and says, “Mason is a chimera. Just—” he pauses, and grins a little over at Mason, an unexpected bout of humor bubbling helplessly in his chest as Mason grins just as helplessly back, “—an exceptionally strong one.”

“Hmm,” Argent hums, but there’s something small, and a little quirked, about the curve of his lips. He holds up his right hand, and wiggles his fingers, and looks at Corey. “And this?”

“Maybe Theo didn’t want me to be afraid anymore,” Corey snaps back.

“Corey,” Mason and Theo both chastise instantly; Corey desists, but the line of his mouth is mulish as he slumps back against the couch.

“That’s so weird,” Liam breathes, Theo’s eyes snapping to his—along with Mason’s, and Corey’s—as he stares back at them.

“He had the ability all along,” Theo eventually answers on Corey’s behalf, and drags his gaze back to Argent. “He just didn’t know it.”

“Well, thank god for you then, huh?” Argent murmurs, and Theo feels his own eyes narrow as he peels back the layers of Argent’s tone, and doesn’t find the sarcasm, or accusation, that he’s expecting.

He doesn’t know what he finds.

Scott clears his throat. “So you stabilized Mason’s condition—”

“—he saved my life,” Mason corrects pointedly.

“—and you taught Corey how to use this other ability,” Scott continues, grimacing in acknowledgement of Mason’s correction but not stopping. “Was that…? I mean, what were you planning on…?” He stops, and blows out a frustrated breath, apparently irritated with his own inarticulateness. “Earlier, you said our timing sucked. You said you were coming home.”

“That was the plan,” Mason agrees, and snorts humorlessly. “Which we were like twelve hours from executing.”

“Theo said we should time it for after your capture of Monroe,” Corey adds, his tone and posture relaxing some out of their defensive prickliness. “He said we should come back after you had her. Pretty much _right_ after you had her, really,” he concludes, darting a look at Theo.

“And I was going to tell you,” Theo hurries to add, and swallows as he meets first Scott’s eyes, and then Argent’s; he can’t bring himself to look at Liam, not yet. “I was going to tell you about the bracelet.”

Argent laughs quietly, though not meanly. “Clever,” he acknowledges. “Use the fact that we would have all been riding too high on our success to fully separate that out from our reactions to you all coming clean.”

“That was the idea,” Theo admits. “I figured it was my best shot.”

He winces immediately after he’s said it, his poor choice of words only fully registering _after_ they’ve already fallen out of his mouth. Some of the humor falls away from Argent’s face, but he meets Theo’s eyes when Theo glances up at him. Theo feels a seed of surprise start to sprout in his chest as Argent looks steadily back, something like hope, maybe, starting to squirm between his ribs, and then he has to stop, and press the back of one wrist to his closed-tight mouth as he something more tangible actually _does_ squirm between his ribs.

“Theo?” Corey and Mason both ask in alarm, reaching for him. Across the room, Scott and Argent and Liam all start forward, and then almost as quickly stop, their eyes flicking to Mason.

“It’s fine,” Theo manages to gasp. “It’s just the—”

He has to cut himself off as his stomach rolls again, his mouth starting to flood with bile.

“It’s the wolfsbane from the bullet,” Argent realizes. “His body’s trying to purge it.”

Theo manages to glance up at him, and sees him frowning tightly. Resisting giving orders, Theo realizes, Argent’s eyes on Mason’s and Corey’s downturned faces. Squeezing his eyes shut, Theo swallows past his watering mouth and starts to try to stand.

“It’s fine, I’ll just,” he tries, and almost immediately stumbles.

“Not _alone_ , you won’t,” Corey snaps, catching him, and then glances uncertainly at Mason.

Mason stares back for a long, fraught second, and then he nods, once.

“I really don’t need an escort,” Theo murmurs to him as Corey is providing him exactly that, one of Theo’s arms over his shoulders as he half-walks, half-drags Theo towards the vacation home’s hallway bathroom.

“Of course you do,” Corey disagrees irritably. “You have, like, the least sense of self-preservation of anyone I know.”

Theo grins tiredly, and doesn’t take his tone personally; he can feel Corey’s worry for Mason left alone with Argent and the others like a thorn at the back of his skull. Instead he lets his head roll a little against Corey’s shoulder and replies, “Really? Because you do know Scott. And Liam, for that matter.”

Corey snorts.

He also stands guard inside the bathroom after he’s deposited Theo down in front of the toilet, and it’s that almost more so than the wolfsbane being forcefully expelled from his system that really causes Theo’s chest to hurt. Corey alternates between shooting Theo these crabbed, hesitant glances, and craning his head back out towards the living room; Theo can hear his fingers drumming against the cabinets below the bathroom’s sink from where Corey is leaning back against it.

 _You don’t have to stay here_ , Theo keeps trying to tell him, but his tongue won’t move even in the brief interludes between his body rejecting the last of the wolfsbane and his stomach settling enough that he could try. Burying his face against his forearms crossed over the toilet bowl, Theo concentrates on the sense of him close by and the sense of him _close by_ —tucked up tight with Mason against the base of his skull—so that he doesn’t have to concentrate on his body slowly, steadily healing.

He isn’t sure how long he stays like that. Probably not more than a few minutes, all told, but he still jerks back to himself when Corey suddenly says, “What do _you_ want?,” low and vicious.

Theo raises his head and glances blearily around, and sees Argent standing just outside the bathroom doorway. He doesn’t try to come further inside but he also doesn’t leave, just keeps looking steadily at Corey now pushed off of the counter and hovering, stiff with tension, between Argent and Theo.

“Corey,” Theo calls quietly. Corey glances back at him. “Go back to Mason,” Theo instructs him gently, and adds before Corey can protest, “He’s struggling with having both of us out of his sight right now. You can feel that, can’t you?”

Corey bites his lip, and shoots an uncertain look at Argent.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” Argent promises quietly, meeting his look.

“What, you mean _again?_ ” Corey sneers, but he also exhales out a rough blast of air immediately afterwards, and darts another look at Theo. Theo nods, once, still hunched over the toilet with his legs sprawled out beneath him. Corey watches him for a few seconds longer, and then he abruptly turns and pushes past Argent.

Argent stares after him, his expression its usual, unreadable sort of neutral, but with the line of his mouth tight. Theo takes advantage of his distraction to push himself, groaning, to his feet, so that he can flush the toilet and then lean just far enough over the sink to flick it on and scoop up a handful of water. By the time he’s finished rinsing out his mouth and has shut the water back off, Argent has refocused on him.

“I’m curious,” he finally says. “How were you expecting me to react when you told me about the bracelet? Assuming, of course,” he adds, “that this particular series of events never happened, and I hadn’t found out about it before you could?”

“I don’t know,” Theo confesses after a long few seconds, still half-bent over the sink. Scrubbing his hands over his face, he reaches over to tip the toilet lid down and then lets himself half-fall onto it. “I was trying not to let myself think too hard about it.”

“And yet you were going to do it anyway,” Argent wonders quietly, and Theo glances up at him, caught by Argent’s thoughtful tone. Argent looks back, his expression searching. After another few seconds, he asks, “Would you even believe me if I said I was sorry?”

Theo stares at him, taken aback. But:

“No,” Theo tells him honestly.

Argent’s lips quirk. “Smart,” he says. “I’m not.” He spends a few seconds studying, Theo’s face. “You and I both know who you were, Theo.”

Theo feels something tight lodge up underneath his throat. “Yeah,” he agrees after a second, near-croaking it out. “We do.”

Argent keeps watching him for a while after he’s said it, and Theo forces himself to hold still under the scrutiny. Out in the living room there’s the murmur of quiet voices, and pressed up tight against the base of Theo’s skull the claustrophobic, wary twist to the sense of Mason and Corey is starting to unwind. Theo swallows, and lets that feeling trickle down the curve of his spine, and holds still.

Finally Argent huffs out a quiet sound, something that could be a laugh but for the harsh, self-deprecating saw to it. Theo feels his brow furrow in confusion as Argent straightens off the wall, his fingers dipping into his jeans’ pocket.

“Still,” he says, as he pulls his hand back out, and Theo sucks in a sharp breath as he sees his bracelet clasped between Argent’s fingers.

He darts a look up at Argent’s face, but Argent just meets his eyes calmly, and then flicks his wrist to toss the bracelet forward, where it hits the mirror above the sink and then clatters down into the porcelain bowl. The bathroom isn’t large, and it takes Argent barely half a step to come the rest of the way inside, his other hand appearing with his lighter—retrieved from Corey—already lit and with a flame flickering from its tip. As Theo watches in open-mouthed shock, Argent touches the flame to Theo’s bracelet in the sink, and holds it there until the leather catches fully alight.

“Still,” Argent repeats, and holds Theo’s eyes when Theo finally rips them away from the burning bracelet to Argent’s own. “I’m glad to have been wrong.”

He straightens up fully, then, and glances back over his own shoulder. Theo’s still so caught up in Argent’s quiet admission and the sight of the burning bracelet that it takes him a few seconds to register Liam standing in the open doorway, one hand on the jamb and one toe tapping nervously against the floor as he glances at Argent, at Theo, at the bracelet already burning itself out in the sink, and finally bites his lip, and looks at the floor. Argent stays where he is for a second longer—long enough to meet Theo’s eyes one last time—and then he slips carefully past Liam in the doorway, leaving the two of them alone.

“That, uh. That’s,” Liam finally stutters, after a handful of awkward seconds have dragged themselves past. “I wasn’t expecting that.” He nods at the remnants of the burned bracelet.

Theo can’t stop staring at him. “Makes two of us,” he finally manages, and Liam flashes him a shaky, there-and-gone grin.

“I wasn’t expecting any of this,” Liam adds abruptly, all in a rush and with his eyes darting evasively around the room; looking anywhere and everywhere but at Theo as he swallows, and bites his lip again. “Just—just not a single part of any of this.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Theo finds himself confessing, the apology just falling out of his mouth. Liam stares at him in open shock for a second, and then his expression twists.

“Yeah, I’m, I’m going to be holding that against you for a really long time,” he admits, half-jokey but half—not, and Theo winces even as he gives Liam an equally-shaky smile back. Liam manages to look at him for a few seconds longer, and then he yanks his attention elsewhere again.

“Liam,” Theo tries, but Liam shakes his head, a little violently.

“I don’t know whether to start yelling at you for lying all this time, or apologize for accidentally siccing Argent on you, or—or,” he blurts out, all in enough of a rush that his syllables are tripping over each other, and Theo has to struggle to keep up, “or _what_ , but—”

“Liam,” Theo tries again, a little alarmed and just starting to stand, but Liam shakes his head again and takes a half-step back.

“Just, just tell me one thing,” he demands, voice cracking down the middle as he does; Theo nods dumbly, frozen halfway through pushing himself to his feet. “If you weren’t actually trapped in Beacon Hills, if you could have left whenever you wanted, why didn’t you—”

“I didn’t want to leave,” Theo interrupts, a little helplessly. “I wanted,” he stops, and closes his eyes, and swallows. “I wanted to stay.”

When he opens his eyes back up, Liam is staring at him.

“If that’s true, then why—why risk it all? Why risk helping them at _all?_ ” His eyes rove over Theo’s face, searching. “You could have just kept pretending you didn’t know where they were, or how to find them.”

Theo stares at him, and then after a few seconds has to let himself drop heavily back down. _I don’t know_ , he almost wants to say, except that he _does_. But this wasn’t the confession he was prepared to make today. He closes his eyes.

“After I found them,” he starts. “After I realized what was happening to Mason, and why, I…” He stops, and swallows. “The Doctors would have done what they did with or without me. But—but _with_ me…”

When he hesitates, and chances a look up at Liam, Liam is staring back at him, riveted and with his mouth dropped softly open and his eyes set beneath a firmly furrowed brow. Theo drops his eyes back down.

“I wanted to give them their lives back,” Theo concludes softly; softly enough that he can see Liam leaning in closer in order to hear him out of the corner of his eye.

But Liam doesn’t come any closer than that, and he doesn’t say anything. After a few seconds the silence gets to be too much for Theo, and he forces his gaze upwards. What he finds is Liam nodding absently to himself, his head tilted up, and out. Back towards the living room, and Mason and Corey within it. But then he bites his lip, and turns back to Theo.

“You said—you said _after_ you found them,” he points out, not argumentative so much as—as confused, maybe. “But what about _before?_ Why risk—why risk helping them _before?_ ”

Theo stares at him. Liam stares back, something banked and hovering on the edge of his expression, a nervous tension vibrating through his hand still clasped around the door jamb and his body still framed in the doorway and his eyes still intent on Theo’s face.

“I…” Theo starts, and then stops, and then swallows, and says, half-reluctantly; half in a quiet, confessional whisper: “You were hurting. I wanted to help.”

Liam stays, frozen, staring at him in the doorway for another split-second, and then he throws himself forward.

Theo startles as he suddenly gets an armful of Liam, Liam crowding him back against the toilet seat and with his hands on either side of Theo’s face as he swallows the soft sound Theo makes, his lips pressed hard to Theo’s own. It takes him a second to react, his mind still struggling to switch gears, but Liam doesn’t waste time, just keeps kissing him, and kissing him, and kissing him, his knees pressing into Theo’s hips and his chest starting to press all of the air out of Theo’s own. Groaning and giving up on understanding exactly how they’d gotten to where they are, Theo wraps his arms around Liam’s waist, and pulls him harder against himself, and kisses him back.

“Hey, you guys okay in—”

Theo hears some unidentified time later, and then a startled yelp, and he pulls, panting, back from Liam’s mouth to look at Scott over Liam’s shoulder. Liam twists around some in Theo’s lap—Theo’s hands spasming around his hips as he does—to stare wide-eyed at Scott, too.

“Oh, god, sorry,” Scott says, and then again, on an embarrassed, grimacing loop. “Ugh, sorry.” At the base of his skull, Theo can feel Mason and Corey’s amusement swelling, either because they were hearing Scott’s apologies and correctly interpreting the situation, or because they were receiving their own feedback from Theo, or both, but either way Theo groans and buries his flushed, overheated face in Liam’s shoulder.

It’s Liam who finally says, “Yes, Scott?,” in an overly-controlled, saccharine voice.

“Right, um. Right,” Scott manages, and Theo—preemptively wincing—raises his head to peer at him over the curve of Liam’s shoulder. “I was just going to…I convinced Mason and Corey to…” He cuts himself off, and takes a deep, apparently-cleansing breath. “We’re going back to Beacon Hills to figure the rest of—of everything out.”

“Oh,” Liam says, more quietly; he slumps a little in Theo’s hold, some of the still-vibrating tension from his and Theo’s interrupted interlude draining out of him. “Oh, right.” His fingers are still around Theo’s face; they spasm, and Theo tilts his head some to smile crookedly up at him as Liam looks reflexively back.

“So!” Scott says, determinedly forcing his way through the awkwardness of the situation. “Argent is going to stay here to—to…”

“Clean up the crime scene?” Theo offers dryly, and picturing the pool of his own blood no doubt drying in the kitchen as he does.

Scott winces, and gives a helpless, if genuine, half-shrug in acknowledgement. “Something like that,” he agrees. “Mason and Corey are going to ride with me, but I was thinking that…well.” He pauses, and looks at Theo. “I was thinking that you’re really in no shape to drive.”

He grimaces again, and this time it’s Theo who shrugs at him. Scott gives him another of those apologetic, half-quirked smiles and then switches his attention to Liam.

“Anyway, I was going to ask if you…if you wanted to take Theo home,” Scott concludes, holding Liam’s eyes.

Liam looks back at him for a few seconds, and then he turns, and looks down at Theo instead. He lifts the fingers of one hand to press them gently to Theo’s temple, the curve of his eyebrow, the corner of his mouth. Theo presses into the small touches, and looks back up at him, and then closes his eyes with a sunburst of something warm cracking open his chest when Liam leans down and kisses him, just once.

“Yeah,” Liam says quietly as he straightens back up, and with his eyes never leaving Theo’s own. “Yeah, I think I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you who could use a reference for what exactly Corey's new ability is, I will admit I wholesale (with love!) stole it from Fenris in Dragon Age II. [Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PYQn4ZzThs) a demonstration of what a different (much less restrained!) person than Corey does with a similar set of abilities. 
> 
> All feed back loved! If you liked, please consider a comment or a [reblog](https://eneiryu.tumblr.com/post/190885754415/breathe-quietly-in-the-shadow-of-all-that-came)!


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